SW2008-A synopsis for the New Year

Thought I would put down in bits my experience so far with 2008. The
good, the bad and the ugly.

Good:
1. This has to be the fact that you can now create parts in context in
an assembly and save them there. Although I haven't fully exercised
this one it has to be an important fundamental change that is going to
require a lot of thought in the coming year on how to put it to best
use. Now you can make and assembly in a part or in an assembly and
have it all self contained.

2. All variations of a rectangle are now available on the toolbar from
the get go, including a parallelogram.

3. Having mates as an RMB choice when picking two mateable items in an
assembly.

4. Pull down command lists of which SaveAs is the most helpful.

The not so good.

1. The RMB mixed metaphor. Why have a mixture of icons and text on
RMB? I never know what to expect anymore. The only thing I can think
of is that SW is heading towards a universal iconic language that
eschews English, French or any other known language.

2. The emasculation of the search functionality in assemblies.

3. Replacing the menus which I still use a lot with another toolbar.

4. Crashes when trying to save a part outside an assembly that was
previously saved in it.

5. Menus over two deep sometimes.

6. A look and feel that is moving towards SolidEdge in some ways.

7. Those darn relation sprites get in the way a lot more.

8. Somebody repainted the sketcher.

9. Alt key assembly picking isn't quite as robust as before.

10. Picking a point to rotate about in sketching doesn't work any
more.

11. Those tiny tabs under the main command bar. I am finally getting
in the habit of looking there.

12. Frequent crashes.

13. The loss of multiple windows and the nifty tool to put up preset 3
views and an iso. One years feature is another years dwindlement.

14. The loss of RMB on the screen to get to rotate, zoom, etc.

15. The loss of SWExplorer as we know it, including the lack of hooks
for 3rd party PDM if that is the way they want to go.

16. Why, oh, why if I only have SW, dwgEditor, and eDrawings do I have
to wade through every SW product known to man when checking out a
license?

17. Blind allies. It seems like if you have plain vanilla SW they let
you go down a blind ally here and there only to find that the addin or
menu item is just a store front.


And the ugly:

Since I had to go with 2008 because my company was new to SW I had to
start on SP0.0. Even though SW has issued three SPs, 0.1, 1.0 and 1.1,
SW2008 isn't stable yet. Why couldn't we just have the option to stick
with the last release until at least half way through a new release
cycle? Guess what, SW still gets their $3,995; the customer gets a
stable release and doesn't have to spend time suffering through,
documenting and reporting problems. Sounds win-win to me. The way it
is, the image will have to be rebuilt and redeployed with every stable
SP.

and the other ugly:

The new super installer which requires all SW products to be
unistalled before you can get rid of it from Add/Remove Programs.
Never had to remove eDrawings before to do a clean install of SW.

 

the good list was quite short.. ;o)

I wonder if they would be willing to license the product to someone to make
an engineers version... )

this company desperately needs someone with a bit of practical grit to
refocus it IMHO

Merry Xmas and a prosperous New Year everyone

 

I was cranking away at it today and noticed some similarity to World
of Warcraft. Icons fading mysteriously in and out.

To add to the not so good list:

In the sketcher when editing an existing extrusion the old extrusion
didn't disappear even when I deleted the entire sketch, save one
construction line. The sketch seemed to want to snap too.

Then there was the sketch that had half its lines disappear and then
reappear. Cheshire cat mode.

Once and only once when CTRL dragging from the component tree into the
assembly it went into ALT drag mode and attempted to mate with
everything on the way to where it was supposed to be. So now we have
the horny component mode.

TOP

 

LOL

 

I definitely appreciate the 'Solid' comments.

I do always wait for SP3 or 4 before upgrading, and I'll keep my
fingers crossed.

Bo

 

No choice Bo. I wish I could have bought 2007 and then waited for a
year.

And yes, the solid remaining visible while you edit its sketch is
real. I am not sure what use it serves or whether it also happens with
more complex geometry like sweeps and lofts, but it is sure there for
extrudes.

I wish Matt where still here to give us a tour of the option chop shop
or how to make it fast as thought. SW now talks back at a pace
reminescent of Pa Kettle.

TOP

 

TOP,

To turn off the solid showing while you are editing you will want to
turn off Instant 3D...... If you have not done to much customizing of
your icons in the Command Manager tabs it is the last icon on the
right.

Cheers,

Anna

 

And I would have thought "moving towards SolidEdge" would have been on the
"good" list Have a Happy New Year!

 

for future reference....

Even though you can only purchase the current release of the software,
you can still run previous releases if you choose.

The 24-digit serial number and activation works for 2006, 2007 &
2008. Just install the older release(s) and go. You'd have to
contact your VAR to get the codes to run earlier releases.

SolidWorks won't ship out the media for older releases, but your VAR
*may* provide it to you - either for free or for a nomnal charge.

 

Ken,

As much as I am "in LUV" with SE, I think SW used to have a fairly
consistent idea of what a good user interface should be. Seems like
they are now nibbling away at a number of different concepts. Whether
in ACAD, SE or SW, having things hidden under a single icon is a no-no
in my book.

TOP

 

Anna,

Do you have a quick list of the things needed to turn off some of the
new features?

The user interface animation, transparency and shadows, etc.

The too smart mates? I don't want SW trying to second guess me and
explode any more assemblies.

The appearance of unlicensed addins in the addin manager?

The creation of an administrative image with only the software
licensed installed? Our IT guy was surprised, as was I, about a 7.13GB
folder size for one application, SW. Considering that I ran SW98+ on
Win95 on a 1GB hard drive there seems to be a bit of bloat going on.

TOP

 

Jim,

Too late, a lot of stuff has been done in 2008. No going back. That is
good to know though I think in the case of a network license what you
said may not be so easy.

TOP

 

Ummm. Think I may be keeping my files in 2006 & 2007 for a LONG time,
just to be safe.

I have truly nothing against progress in features and better
interfaces, but in order for me to accept them, they can NOT turn my
usability and time spent upside down. I along with many other users
simply can't take a multi-week hit in relearning. That doesn't even
count the effect of "bugs" or "features" which act like bugs.

I've said it before, and I think it is true for companies, that they
can NOT afford to blindly accept "upgrades" which disrupt their
systems and people. 3D CAD ought to be far better debugged before
offering it to companies in my estimation.

I know it must be tough for SolidWorks to debug everything, but
somewhere, somehow, there ought to be methods in both software and in-
house designers who are tasked with real world jobs to test out the
new releases.

Bo

 

TOP,

It is pretty easy to figure out. All you need to do is walk through
all the system options. I think every user should take a trip through
the system options after installing to see what has been added or
changed anyway.

Also a RMB in the Command Manager/Toolbar area with each of the
document types open and you can Customize the CM/TB like always.
Check out the Toolbars and Options tabs in the Customize menu. There
are check boxes there that will allow you to turn off the Context
Sensitive icons when you RMB if you do not like them.

The only annoying option that is not real obvious is the Live 3D icon
that adds the extra gee-wiz graphics.

Also be sure to RMB with your cursor in the Heads Up Icon area for
each document type. You can toggle on/off various icons to your
liking. I think in future SP's we will be able to add icons to that
area. At the moment we are limited to what is available when you
RMB. If the Heads Up Icon toolbar really bothers you, just toggle off
all the icons.

I don't loose to much sleep about the unlicensed add-ins since I do
not have any add-ins that I did not install. You can select what add-
ins you want to install with the SW Installation Manager.

I also am not to worried about the bigger install directory for the
admin images. We have a lot of space on our NAS device. Yes, when
you have SW Premium you have a lot of extra software available to you
from a core SW license. I won't go into the discussion on bloatware.
Lets just say that I am very happy to not be working on a Win95
machine with the it old/slow hardware. There were many a folk that
thought Win95 was boatware in its day. All a matter of
perspective....

Cheers,

Anna

 

Thanks.

As far as the admin image goes, I paid particular attention the second
time I built it and it still seems to carry all that baggage with it.
I know I didn't have those things checked when building it. The size
of the image does bother our IT guy. No arguing with IT.

One term I wasn't familiar with was the term Heads Up Display (HUD)
for the icons over the right mouse context menu. It was in my list of
bad things, I just didn't know what it was called. To continue the
abbreviation game I'll call it HUDoM for HUD over Menu.

Just like on the IRS 1040, I'll have to estimate the time needed to
reconfigure and learn the user interface at 4 hours.

TOP

 

TOP,

As far as the Heads Up Display goes I don't remember what SW
officially calls it. Must be my automotive and aviation background as
to why I refer to it as a HUD.

You did know what I was talking about though.....

Happy New Year,

Anna

 

Paul,

Writing about SW on Christmas night indicates you may have some really
serious Work-Life Balance issues!

Personally, I never gave SW a thought from 12/20 through 1/1. I feel much
better for it, although I'm sure to pay for it in the next couple of weeks.

New company? I hope this is a good thing.

Jerry Steiger

 

I've posted over most holidays. Too cold and snowy to mess around
outside, though I did get in a bit of snowshoeing.

TOP

 

A week into the new year with 2008 and just to add to the bad.

1. Could not login to my customer portal yet again. Asked for a new
password, but because it takes a half hour to update I could not start
the download before leaving for the day. SW has a seriously bad
problem providing state of the art password control of their website
that has necessitated at least a half dozen calls to the mothership
for resolution. Add to this the fact that when logging in it really
doesn't tell what has gone wrong or that the new password is not yet
active and ..... maybe someone is sitting there watching people bang
their heads against the wall.

TOP

 

Too late, a lot of stuff has been done in 2008. No going back. That is

It's even easier with a network license. The 2008 license manager
supports clients running everything back to 2004.