Novedge Pulse™ of Matt Lombard

The voting for SolidWorks World Top 10 list has been active for a few days now. Right now, every item displays on my computer as having a score of 0, even though there are definitely votes for each. You can vote +1 or -1 on each item, so scores of zero are definitely  [more...]

The Freeze Bar was my favorite feature in 2012. Until, that is, I started using it. It was one of the things that was supposed to show up in 2011, but reportedly wasn’t ready. It got a lot of scrutiny in the Beta forums, but what was delivered is not, in my opinion,  [more...]

I know I’ve posted 3D-enabled blog posts here before – one using 3Dxml from DS and one using a tool from Autodesk. They were both pretty slow. With everybody messing their pants about mobile computing, it really confuses me why we don’t see a lot  [more...]

Martyn Day has been tweeting from a DS European Customer Forum. Below is a twitter stream from Martyn. In twit style, you have to read this from the bottom up to get the right chronology, but Martyn’s comment at the top seems to sum it up nicely. It all seems  [more...]

There was another press release about another SolidWorks customer switching to Solid Edge. I get the feeling we’re going to be seeing more and more of these things, as Solid Edge gets more and more aggressive, while SolidWorks is stoic and passive. I think SolidWorks  [more...]

The post on GrabCAD got a fair amount of discussion on this blog and in other places.  In the CAD community the anticipated proliferation of 3D printing and some outlandish misconceptions of how that is going to change the acquisition of manufactured goods, are becoming  [more...]

Yeah, I know, it sounds like it could be the lead-in for a dirty joke. Unfortunately, it’s not. I was starting a brand new model at midnight on a Saturday. And I come across this. This is the kind of thing that can (and has) cost me money. Why SolidWorks allows  [more...]

Black Hole Feature EnabledBlack Hole Feature DisabledI can’t take credit for the name. Some guys I work with from time to time actually named this.  The idea is that every now and then you get a feature that sucks all the geometry around it down to a single point.  [more...]

The Solid Edge version of SolidWorks World is now being called Solid Edge University, although Dave Ault is holding out for last year’s name, the Solid Edge Summit. Whatever you call it, you can get registered now.  It’s only $350 to attend if you register  [more...]

Let’s say you want to start a business. The easiest way to start a business is to get other people to do the work for you. And even easier than that is to get other people to just collect stuff they find from anywhere and everywhere, and put it up on your site  [more...]

Going through and testing 3D formats is kind of a wild ride. 3D pdf works, except in Chrome because Chrome uses the Foxit viewer (which I also had installed separately), and Foxit doesn’t display 3D PDFs. You can disable/enable the Foxit/Adobe plugins by typing  [more...]

Indent is one of those features that has been out for several releases, but you don’t hear too much about it. To me, it is one of those magical features that I don’t use much, but when I use it, it usually saves me a load of time. I can’t say that  [more...]

I don’t usually comment on general news items on this blog, but the Stop Online Piracy Act is relevant to anyone who creates or owns patents or copyrighted data, which includes anyone who uses CAD software. Just as a warning, this post is a bit of a political  [more...]

SolidWorks Trim function does a lot more than just trimIn the course of my day-to-day work, I often come across stuff I like, or that I think works particularly well. The Trim sketch tool is one of those things. This was updated several years back, and the new functionality  [more...]

This is creating a bit of noise. So far I’ve seen comments from Anna Wood and Devon Sowell, two of the more stable and conservative of the defunct SolidWorks Blog Squad who have both made positive comments about this move.Read more on SolidEdge offers Monthly  [more...]

There’s a bit of a conversation over on the Top10 site going on about the Shell feature. The conversation is worthwhile, and I just wanted to share some specific cases I have.Read more on Capabilities of the SolidWorks Shell Command… [more...]

gThere are some benefits to attending SolidWorks World. But I went to a lot of them in a row, and it got to be the same old stuff, and after a few of them, not much new benefit. It costs you a week of time, and at least a couple thousand bucks for flights, hotels,  [more...]

Dan made a great point. If SolidWorks isn’t going to listen, let’s just talk to someone else, about things that interest us, no less.So, for all you surface users out there, let’s do another Top 10 list for what kind of stuff you need to do your work.  [more...]

I never used SolidWorks 95, but I evaluated 96, and bought 97. I evaluated against Autodesk Mechanical Desktop, Micro CADAM Helix, and SDRC Artisan series. Mechanical Desktop was a full-on nightmare. Helix didn’t seem to have much momentum. I would have bought  [more...]

Ok, this is starting to drive me crazy. I appreciate that people still buy the books I’ve written. That’s nice. There’s still information in them that is useful.I’ve been getting a lot of questions about where to find the data from the DVDs.Read  [more...]

A paper has appeared on the Russian CAD blog Isicad.net that some of you may be interested in reading. It summarizes the history of NURBS, subdivision surfaces, and Tsplines. I find that reading stuff like this helps me understand and appreciate tools that are available  [more...]

I got an email today from Matt  Sederberg stating that Tsplines has been acquired by Autodesk. This is a bad outcome for Solidworks users. the last time something like this happened Autodesk acquired Moldflow and we lost the Moldflow Express product. I have a possibly  [more...]

Since I started talking about this, I should be more complete. The SolidWorks 2012 Modify box for dimensions has a lot of new functionality. It encompasses equations and link values.Equations can be entered into the main value box by just typing an “=”,  [more...]

This was a comment from a reader in a recent post:One of the people who originated SW said in an interview that they’d settled on parasolid rather than ACIS because there were certain blend examples that parasolid would do that ACIS couldn’t. That was a lot of years  [more...]

Lately I’ve been interested in broadening my horizons. Comparing CAD systems seems to be my way of doing that. I’ve been talking to some industry people, and learning a lot of stuff. Most of what I’m learning is making me even less optimistic about  [more...]

SolidWorks recent development resources are reportedly being used to develop IT answers to questions you may not have asked. People buy CAD software for several reasons, but I would guess that the most common reason is for use as a tool to develop product geometry,  [more...]

Thanksgiving is past, and everyone (in the US)  is off of work, what a great opportunity to slip in something that doesn’t have to do with the same old same old. Still, I hesitate to write about open source, because the topic usually attracts a fair number of  [more...]

When I attended Siemens PLM Connection, it was amazing to me how central Teamcenter was to the whole Siemens PLM mission. Teamcenter is of course the data/lifecycle management tool from Siemens. Large organizations seem to like Teamcenter for various reasons, but what  [more...]

The guys over at Solid Edge are continuing a push to introduce their product to a CAD industry in turmoil. While other vendors are solving problems that don’t exist, Solid Edge is giving users good options. Here’s what’s going on at SE now:Read more  [more...]

It gets tiring always being a downer. Always being “against”. I really do feel that SolidWorks hasn’t given me as a design professional much to cheer about in the last several years. There are obviously some other people out there that feel the same  [more...]