Anybody read the whole tome yet?
I read it cover to cover with every new release with the intention of putting together my own little "What's REALLY New in 200x" presentation for user group meetings. I like to pick out the stuff that doesn't get the "rollout" hype. Richard
Your response and the underwhelming response as a whole seems to indicate what my experience was when doing tech support. There are a few gems in every release that user's need to know about and a lot that can be disregarded. So how can we help SW figure out those things that will really matter? The current system reminds me of the Edsel story. It was one of the first cars to be designed based on a market survey.
I think part of the problem is that there are many things that change, and who's to say what's important. When the 2006 stuff was mentioned at SWW, you didn't see or hear everyone responding at the same things. There were a few that caught most people's attention, but for the most part, your interest is based on what you do with it. For example, surfacing improvements don't mean much to me as I have hardly ever used a spline on purpose. On the other hand, I like the sheet metal improvements, but know some people that would wrinkle up their noses at the thought of square corners and forming limitations. So, I try to read through the book each time, but some sections get a closer scrutiny than others. WT
One problem, of course, is that what warms your heart may be nothing at all to me. The really big problem is that what matters to almost all of us is speed and robustness. SW doesn't seem to be able to figure that one out, no matter how loud we scream. They constantly talk the talk and never walk the walk. Jerry Steiger Tripod Data Systems "take the garbage out, dear"
I suppose a good user group presentation could kind of be the Readers Digest version. SW is getting too darn big for any one person to comprehend it all. And yes, there are the improvements that everyone wants and nobody seems to get. Whenever I read something technical these days (like the API help) I sometimes find myself asking, why? Why this (new) feature? What is it good for? Where can I use it? How does it work? When is it appropriate? When not? And then of course the 2005 What's New was not printed, it is electronic. I'm still a fan of paper and ink because I can put notes and stickies in it, and read it at stop lights and other convenient places and keep it on a shelf to refer to when 2006 comes out and the electronic What's New is not 2005 anymore.
walk. Unfortunately true. I can't help but feel that they are eroding my love for them slowly with all the baggage that has to come along with using the software. I seem to be speiding more and more time fiddling with minor things that are supposed to improve my productivity, but somehow plunges is directtly into the toilet. I know that I'm a bit stuck in a mode of "how things are done" and some new learning is always needed, but I count many-many microscopic sins as heavily as a few glaring ones. Adding features and little niceties ad nauseum will not make up for slow and buggy sluggish software. Confession: I still spend far too much time (anguishing time) trying to select silhouette edges in drawings, activating views, "accidentally" drawing something in one view and trying to relate it to another view and being told "you can't relate things from one view to another". Ok im just a silly user, why not understand that I need to do this and move the entity into that view. Instead they give me the transparent flyout assembly tree, still won't cleanup my dangling bends that have no justificaiton for existence, I don't have any dimensional grips available in 05-sp1.0 (did I do something wrong?), that new BOM is a real weasle to use, when I use a diameter dimension for annotaion, I have to tell the program that "yes i really want to do this", cosmetic threads don't show in my detail vews sometimes, writng a DWG file from 05 give me 118" long extension line arrows . . . Eurika! I think that most of my ill-feelling is based on that clumsy drafting module. The parts and assy's work pretty nice. Yes, it's the drafting that makes me ill . . . Later, SMA
When SW first came along it was so simple to understand and use when compared to Pro/E. Not only is SW getting very complex, but the "furniture" is being moved from time to time. Figuring out where the "furniture" has been moved to is counter productive. It seems to me that the original mindset to take the power of Pro/E and make it easy to use has been subverted by a mindset of interface remake. For example, the little relation emoticons in sketcher are just a knock off of Solid Edge. I didn't like them in SE much and I like them little better in SW although SW allows them to be turned on and off and they do more in SW better than SE. I could live without them and if they slow down the sketcher, well, that has been handled elsewhere. I really have a hard time believing that users asked to have these put in because they would go to SE otherwise.
More examples: When will SW simplify the creation of the toroidal bend feature? When will SW simplify the creation of the parametric curve? When will SW simplify the creation of the contour loft? When will SW simplify the creation of broken out sections? When will SW simplify the creation of half sections? When will SW simplify the creation of oblique projections?
