2007 bad, good, great or should I wait for sp1?

these are thoughts! good, bad, or indifferent! please take with a grain of salt (or salt in smoke form as demonstrated in the latest issue of Popular Science)!

bob z. has been using swx2007 for about a week now. SP0.0 has been incredibly stable. Not a single crash. This has been with fairly simple assy's and somewhat difficult geometry.

more good: Some things that bob z. has noticed. We can open a drawing and hit save and then close and nobody will ask if you turned out the lights, closed the door, or would like fries with that or, oh my goodness! - would you like to save?!?! open, print, close. end of story. very nice step in the right direction.

How many of you open more than one document at a time? bob z. can't just open one part. He has to open two or more. Maybe he is trying to overcompensate for something... Well, now you can multi-select parts from within the swx file open dialog box. No more drag and drop from windows explorer!

Parts with radii look really cool now. If you prefer to design with hard edges turned on, the tangent edges do not show a hard line. Not sure yet if there is a setting for this. Looks cool, though. Is this more smoke and mirrors, swx? If so, bob z. likes it.

bob z. played a little with the dim Xpert. This looks promising - have not used it in the real world yet. bob z. will, though.

bob z. expected swx2007 to be slower than 2006. Every release has been this way - 2006 was slower than 2005. 2005 was slower than 2004, etc. For once, this doesn't appear to hold true. bob z. hasn't done any back to back testing, but the sketcher feels 'snappy'. The whole thing feels snappy. This could totally be just bob z. EXPECTING it to be slower than the previous release. It is probably exactly the same. Same is not bad, but it is not necessarily an improvement, or is it?

The save reminder is definitely a good thing. Turn this feature on. Set it to remind you every 5 minutes. If this gets to be too soon for you, change it. The important thing is to use it. This feature rocks.

This is all good ol' bob z. can think of right now. If more comes to him, he will definitely share. If anybody was expecting some bad points, well, bob z. hasn't seen anything yet. Nothing that can't be traced directly back to this radeon video card.

bob z. p.s. 'what not', 'what have you', 'and everything', and 'and that' (these are habit words and phrases - the result of a limited vocabulary. it's o.k. - we still love you.) :~)>

My service provider called me and warned me not to upgrade until at least the first service pack because of some issues related to configurations. I use configurations a lot and would nash my teeth if something disrupted the way they are handled. I haven't had time to install a second copy of SW and run some tests--I am waiting to hear that the issues have been resolved. There are some features that I would like to be taking advantage of.

My service provider called me and warned me not to upgrade until at least the first service pack because of some issues related to configurations. I use configurations a lot and would nash my teeth if something disrupted the way they are handled. I haven't had time to install a second copy of SW and run some tests--I am waiting to hear that the issues have been resolved. There are some features that I would like to be taking advantage of.

bob z. just found what could be a showstopper. Please, SolidWorks fix this in sp1.0!!! bob z. just noticed that when you mate two components (probably the way he does it causes the problem and maybe there is a setting now...), the default is mate coincident and if the two components are not coincident, it'll show the distance greyed out. if you click the distance option, the dimension is there and if that is what you want, you can just hit OK. For some reason, the distance is defaulting to 1.00. Mighty peculiar...

Oh yeah, almost forgot. The tangent edges in the model are now being shown. Video card issue?

bob z. p.s. my sister got lucky, married a yuppie...

Hello CD listeners....

There is no longer a need to hold the ALT key when dragging views. In previous versions of swx, you were required to hit the edge of a part, the drawing view border, or hold the ALT key to move views. Well, this is only three of the options. There are probably more. In 2007, you just click anywhere in the view and drag away!

bob z. p.s. Words can be broken, so can bones...

bob z. must retract the above. this previously described functionality now appears to be broken... :~(

bob z. p.s. ...

funny you should mention this, there was a HUGE discussion about this on

for exact thread see

funny. they won't let good ol' bob z. into that forum. they won't even let his creator in.

bob z.

hole tables work now. at least, they now work in the way that bob z. likes. you can set the number of decimal places on a per cell basis and not be forced to apply it to the whole table.

thank you, solidworks!!!

bob z.

it's just a simple registration

This is a much talked-about regression. They say it's gonna be corrected (ie. back to the original) in SP 1. John

just a simple registration. that is probably the funniest thing bob z. has ever read on the internet.

bob z.

There was a tech bulletin posted on the subscription site about that. A certain set of operations on a lightweight assembly would cause config specific properties of a component to be deleted. So don't do that.

It's back to the original way now. It'll be back to the new way for SP1.0, or so I read.

It is now back to the default distance rather than 1 (at least it is that way in 2007 EV1.

Unless you have modified the hole callout for counterbored holes. Huge problem with that for hole tables.

One of my favorites is the ability to add jogs to existing leaders, such as on weld symbols, notes, balloons, etc. It's now a RMB function to the regular leader, rather than a separate annotation.

WT

Another great addition is the ISOLATE command. Allows you to pick one or more items to show and hides all the rest.