Hi all,
While I have been pushing for lots of comments for improving SW's drawing environment I do want to say some positive things reguarding SW's in general.
Before I started using SW I was fairly proficient with Inventor 7. For some of you that are still wondering which CAD product to purchase some of these comments may be helpful. And while I had a significant investment in both dollars and training time IV was so frustrating that I basically started from scratch by buying SW.
For the last year or so I have been using SW exclusively but a friend of mine is needing to learn IV, (per his employer) so I have been helping him. He is using IV 11 and I started out thinking that Autodesk has probably cleaned up a lot of "issues" between IV7 and IV11.
As I have been helping my buddy through his first project it is amazing just how quickly I have forgotten some of the frustrations that IV created on a daily basis. Over the last week, here are a few of the things that occured.
1) My buddy did some work and was careful to save it but the next day when he re-opened the assembly, it was a total disaster. He basically had to start out from scratch and rebuild the entire assembly. Perhaps he pushed some button wrong but I rember times when this happened to me. Never did figure out why this happens sometimes but even as a new user with SW I don't remember a time when I didn't get back what I had saved before shutting down the software.2) During the design process the main plate needed to be lengthened by
3". Seemed simple enough but IV had placed a number of "free" constraints onto the sketch which took a while to figure out. I have found that it is much easier to resolve such issues in SW because I have a hot key that toggles the sketch constraints on and off, (the S key) so I can see where the conflict is. It also seemed much easier to edit the constraints in SW then it was in IV. The next problem that happend after the main plate was 3" longer in IV was that returning to the assembly there were about 15 errors that were generated in the constraints. It took a while to wade through them, (about an hour total to make one part 3" longer). In SW I just have not had the same number of "random" errors generated with constraints. There are times when things blow up in SW but this is usually the direct result of some surface that I have eliminated that was referenced. And in SW these are fairly easy to correct.3) The third major disaster, occured today when my buddy opened his assembly, (with a grand total of about 10 parts). He found that one of the parts had been duplicated and was floating above the assembly. Of couse as a new user, these things seem to happen more often. But, to correct these types of problems all that needed to be done is to delete the random part in both IV and in SW. However, IV had some other strange things going on which resulted in us deleting 3 parts that got unlinked somehow....???? and then about a dozen constraints... what a mess.... And as a new user he was very careful to save his work.
SW does have it's issues but I have found that the frustration level for IV is many times more. There were other little things that poped up with IV but thankfull with SW I have long forgotten about most of them. I am totally amazed that IV is still so "fragile" in some areas.
Seeing IV again, I am more convinced then ever that the user interface is much more logical then SW. As an example, one screen poped up, (while we were looking for something) that had probably every prompt/message in IV with a way of controlling if it was displayed or not. There are messages in SW that are just anoying and there is no way of turning them off. Also, the layout of the tools in IV are much more intuitive. At times I find myself looking in some of the stranges pull down places in SW. All of this would give the impression to a potential new user that IV is much easier to learn the SW. However, the strange-unexpected-free "features" that apparently IV still pops up with are extremely hard to deal with. And you usually don't seem these free features when you are watching a demo.
I noticed that after about 6 months of IV that I was able to avoid many, (but not all) of the sequences that were prone to creating problems. But, it took about 9 months to be able to understand and to effectively respond to the strange error messages that fairly routinely pop up in IV. Because SW is apparently more inherently stable I felt that after 3 months of working with/ learning SW that I had surpassed the effeciency that I had after 9 months with IV.
I hope this helps.