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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.

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

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

  1. 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.

  1. The emasculation of the search functionality in assemblies.

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

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

  2. Menus over two deep sometimes.

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

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

  1. Somebody repainted the sketcher.

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

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

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

  1. Frequent crashes.

  2. 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.

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

  2. 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.

  1. 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?

  2. 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.

Reply to
TOP
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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... :o)

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

Merry Xmas and a prosperous New Year everyone

Reply to
neil

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

Reply to
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

Reply to
Anna Wood

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

Reply to
ken

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.
Reply to
jimsym

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

Reply to
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

Reply to
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

Reply to
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

Reply to
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

Reply to
Anna Wood

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

Reply to
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

Reply to
Anna Wood

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

Reply to
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

Reply to
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

Reply to
TOP

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

Reply to
jimsym

Good

  1. Instant 3D when in parts. The ability to accurately resize parts and sketches seems to work OK.

  1. Copy Mates. Finally a decent way to mate multiple fastener stackups.

Bad

  1. The help for Copy Mates is useless.
Reply to
3pi14156

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