first of all, excuse the wrong english translation of many terms, but i'm not too keen on technical terms related to cad design --this is why i ask so few things on this newsgroup :|--
yesterday i've attended my var's presentation of swx 2004. well, i must be sincere: this will be the worse expence i've had in the past 5 years.
they told us that 8 of the 10 most requested features have been added and explained some of the new amazing things swx is now able to do. i'll try to believe somebody is so stupid to ask such dumb features, but i will also ask myself how it is possible nobody --or only few users, like us-- asked for:
- a better 2d environment. well, actually a *decent* 2d environment and a terrestrian way to treat sections and interrupted views... is it possible nobody has ever had to create drawings for "long" parts? never had to work on 3 or 4 or 5 meters-long parts having small details on both the extreme sides and in the middle of the part? details are *not* always the solution for this problem. i guess why we still can't interrupt twice a view of a part. and i guess why the heck i can't draw correctly the axes of a couple of holes without re-composing the view and the interrupting it again. and i't likt to know why it is not possible to interrupt 2 related views at the same time and in the *same* point. if i'm drawing the side view of a 2.8 meters mast of the stacker, it's *easy* that the front view will be 2.8 meters long, too, and it would be *nice* to be able to interrupt them at the same time. damn, i'd like to take a couple of the "engineers that design for engineers" at swx corp. and to see them drawing almost everyday *big* things in 21" screens without going out crazy.
- a better way to treat soldered assemblies. we were waiting for a decent way to have an assembly containing some parts that will be soldered together. swx continues saving every soldering on its own and asking you a name for it. very useful. and confortable. expecially if you have a pdm... damn... aren't they able to save *inside* the assembly i want those parts soldered and the solderings' parameters? a soldering is *not* a part, it's a feature of the assembly, it's something i will do on the assembly when building it. it's something i will never ever ever ever ever reuse in any other assembly. it has no sense saving it on its own.
- sheet metal. i'm not asking our software to be able to bend 35 times a random-shaped multibody sheet metal. i'd simply like it to be able to create some of the things our carpenters do. we manufacture electronic pallet trucks, stackers and whatever moves goods inside companies. we're not able to build a 3d model of our forks. they're made of 1 sheet metal, laser cut, with 5 bends and a couple of solderings. is it possible people at swx company is not able to improve the sheet metal engine? we'd like to be able to add a flange to fill a gap or whatever.
- the manuals. actually, 100 euros for a 130 pages paper manual is a price a little bit too high. i'd expect to have a couple of manuals with a multithousanddollars software, but if they can't afford printing us lusers, they could at least sell them at a reasonable price. the api interface, expecially, is thinner than most of the magazines you find in n.p. kiosks and costs 100 euros --something around 120usd--. well i sincerely believe we're going the wrong direction. i use to buy 1.250 pages books from microsoft press or addison or any other company for 60 to 80 euros: swx printed manuals seem to have a too high price...
- who the heck asked for that stupid office-like-assistant? if we wanted crappy software, we'd buy microsoft's applications. swx is a software dedicated to professionals and if a customer doesn't want to pay for a 5 days course "how to use swx for marine invertebrated monocellular organisms" this doesn't mean everybody else has to pay in terms of performances. i begin to be disappointed i have to change our workstations to have zero *really* new features and tons of ms-like aesthetic appeal.
- new multibody soldered parts (don't know the english for this). now you can do a wonderful thing: take a sketch and overlap this sketch with unified profiles taken from external libraries and build a complex part. ok, who will use this? tell me *why* i should build an assembly in a part? and why should i build an assembly in a part if i know i will convert it to an assembly when saving? and why, supposing i want to do all of this, should i want to have the dimensions of the parts deriving from this assembly to be related to the original sketch? one of the advantages of working with parts is reusing parts in other assemblies. when you cannot change freely parts' dimensions, you loose the advantage of working with parts. or not? our var told us that most of the people was disappointed by having to give a name to every part of every assembly "because they didn't work this way when drawing with pencil", but i cannot imagine a different way of working.
what made me sad is, expecially, that they spent so much time showing the way the assistant works, the easier ways to work for dummies and/or newbies, and the amazing new multibody soldered part. and what about things developed for people *working* with cad?
just my 2.400.000 eurocents.