WorldCAD Access

In upFront.eZine this week: What PCT tells Wall Street about Creo

In this week's upFront.eZine, we have for you...

1. PTC Talks About Creo to Financial Analysts    
     - Litigation Settled

2. Understanding Hybrid Workflows between CAD and BIM   
     Part 2: Practical Applications

3. And in Other News

You can read all about the business of CAD this week at www.upfrontezine.com/2011/upf-676.htm

 

 

We love analysts for the incomprehensible stuff they say...

My favorite lines from last week's PTC conference call with financial analysts:

"And last question, and I’ll get back in the queue just to keep beating the dead horse." (Sterling Auty)

"Is that where we can expect the level to kind of trend for a while? Or do you expect that level to pick up, or maybe even dip a little bit? How consistent would that level be going forward?" (Yun Kim)

"And I think just to again add some more color, clearly we have taken you guys through this domino monetization model." (Jim Heppelmann)

And here comes my favorite word... 

"If you look at the group of 22 [major accounts]now, how much of them could you bucketize as sort of in the first phase versus a second phase versus a final phase of implementation?" (Blair Abernethy)

Source.

foto of the sunday: toilet, west coast style

Toilet near the beach at Pacific Rim National Park (BC, Canada), but we all call it Long Beach. Travel tip: no need to pay the National Park Pass fee when camping at this national park. 

(Photo taken June, 2010.) 

If you wondering what SolidWorks Cloud will look like, we've got pictures (of the next best thing)

After the SolidWorks Cloud marketing fiasco of the last year, nothing was shown from the  main stage at last week's SolidWorks World 2011. Nothing! The only time it got mentioned was when new-CEO Bertrand Sicot promised that there would be always be a locally-installed version of Solidworks (*koff* as long as there is a demand in the market *koff*).

(I'm starting to wonder if nothing was shown because the project is hugely delayed. Last year, ex-CEO Jeff Ray said he was showing us the result of three years' work. In a recent interview, it sounded like there was another year or two to go. Four years in development, maybe longer. That's a long time in this world where components make it easy to cobble together a CAD system. As comparison, AutoCAD Mac took 18 months to be ported to OS X.)

Instead,  we got a demo of SolidWorks Live Buildings, which has nothing to do with SolidWorks (as it now exists) and has nothing to do with mechanical engineering. It was, however, significant, because it is based on the same V6 technology as SolidWorks Cloud will be based. ("V6" is the general name for Dassault's next generation cloud-based, social, design software.)

When you look at Live Buildings, you are looking at SolidWorks Cloud.

During the demo, I snapped many pictures in rapid succession. From examining them, I've found the following user interface elements.

First thing to notice: no ribbon. Instead, LB sports the traditional menu bar.

Second thing to notice: all modeling is done in a fully rendered environment, with simulated shadows.

Parts Library -- lets you drag and drop pre-build parts (aka blocks, cells, components) into the drawing.

At-cursor tools -- small toolbar appears at the cursor from which you select relevant tools.

Bird's-eye view -- shows an overview of the entire drawing, in a semi-transparent rectangle.

Wheel with tools -- is the primary user interface, from which toolbars jut out when you select a segment on the wheel.

Floors (stories) -- quickly lets you navigate between floors on multi-story buildings.

Status bar -- is like a communications center (more later).

Triad -- shows the xyz orientation in 3D space. We saw another program that had a miniature version of the model at the center of the triad, and I expect that feature to migrate its way over.

Here is a close-up of the menu bar:

Here is a closeup of the wheel:

Here is a closeup of the status bar:

Ready to Search -- might use the French search engine that Dassault recently acquired.

Ready for Selection -- I wonder if this provides a variety of selection modes, such as by geometry, by properties, by owner, by location?

Ready to Chat -- for communicating with other users on the project.

Ready for Propagate -- I think this is for updating the master model with changes made locally.

Since Dassault's heritage is in history-based modeling, LB sports a feature tree.  

 2D drawings can be placed, in this case from DraftSight. The 2D floorplan can be used as a guide to place 3D components.

Since LB is meant as to be for conceptual architectural planning, it includes energy analysis through sun studies and so on:

 Other data sets will be added later, such as zoning regulations.

 

In upFront.eZine this week: SolidWorks World transitions to DassaultWorks World

In this week's upFront.eZine, we have for you...

SolidWorks World 2011:

- N!fuse
- Post3D
- Live Buildings
- DraftSight
- SolidWorks 2012
- Local Motors
- The DSication of SW

You can read all about the business of CAD this week at www.upfrontezine.com/2011/upf-675.htm

 

Highlights from SolidWorks World 2011 Day 3 Keynote

Day 3 is the day we wait for at SolidWorks World, to learn what's new in the next release of SolidWorks. What we are shown is early stuff, because the software won't ship for another 8 months or so. Here is an overview of some of the things we were shown this morning:

Feature freeze will be in 2012.

Complete uninstall: registry, install folders, users files; can be uninstalled by administrator

Span dual monitors, with new controls to maximize to right or left monitor.

Pin files (a dialog box with recent projects)

Units switcher on the status bar (mm/inches)

Enhancements to sheet metal design, such as select which faces to unbend

Command search

Automatically double dimensions when dimensioning diameters

Automatic solve order solves parameters in the correct order

Can specify which balloon is the first one, others reoder automatically.

New magnet line for lining up balloons.

The XYZ compass in 3D Via Composer shows a mini version of the model.

20112 has a costing tool, so no need to use Excel to figure out the cost to manufacture the current design.

SolidWorks will support motion sensors, like actuator forces, bearing loads, to let the computer run an optimization of design variations.

New large design review mode opens masive designs in seconds, even on laptops.

Other New Software

The first AEC product was shown, called "SolidWorks Live Building", even though it is not based on SolidWorks. it is based on Dassault's V6 software, and so I suppose this is a hint at what the new V6-based SolidWorks might also be like.

It is an interactive 3D environment for quickly creating concepts of new buildings, exterior and interior. We were shown how a cubicle can be dragged from a palette, and then place in the drawing as an array. You can use a 2D drawing from DraftSight as a floorplan, from which to extrude walls. Energy studies, cross sections, etc. More details -- and pictures -- in tomorrow's upFront.eZine.

And we also saw -- briefly -- a version of DraftSight running on an iPad.

1,000,000, Part II

In 2009, SolidWorks shipped their one millionth copy of SolidWorks -- commercial and educational copies combined. Last November, they shipped their 1,000,000th copy to education. The number of subsequent commercial seats was not announced.

Next year, SolidWorks World 2012 is in San Diego. 

SolidWorks World 2011 - Day 1

It's a sunny, cloudless, cold this morning in San Antonio Texas. Up at 6:30am after an all-day series of flights to cross the continent. The Marriott hotel chain made the brilliant decision to locate two hotels across the street from each other, both named Marriott River---. One is the Riverfront, the other the Riverside. Naturally, taxi drivers don't know the difference and so tourists end up being told by the registration desk to "go across the street" to the other one. In the morning, I ask a hotel employee how to get to the convention center. He doesn't know, and says he doesn't want to misdirect me. Thoughtful fellow. 

And so it is that I am reporting Day 1 on Day 2. As fellow journalist Randall Newton put it, we're doing a lot of listening, not a lot of writing. 

General Session
Former SolidWorks ceo Jeff Ray welcomed us one last time to SolidWorks World and to his home town of San Antonio. He introduced the senior design engineer of Schramm, who made the drill rig used to locate the Chilean miners, as well as the secondary "Plan B" rescue tunnel. Another SolidWorks customer designed the pneumatic drill that chipped away at the rock. Halfway through, the drill failed because the rock was harder than expected. The broken bit had to be retrieved; a new bit was designed on site with SolidWorks, and then three days later a new drill bit arrive from the USA. Sunglasses provided to rescued miners were by Oakley, another SolidWorks customer. Interesting how the disaster turned into a feel-good marketing event.

Next up was DesignMatters, a company that wonders how to design something that's hard to use incorrectly. In this case, a blue LED light to combat infant jaundice: just one child fits in, so that two don't fit (results in cross infection), lights shine from above and below, and the units is controlled with two buttons.

And then the highlight: the flight commander of Apollo 13, which suffered the explosion 55 hours into the journey to the moon. It was pretty amazing to hear first-hand from the man whose words were made famous by the movie, "Houston, we have a problem."

Also interesting to hear: In the Mercury era, NASA had 100 mathematician women who were called "computers." They spent all day with calculators determining the Mercury flight route, graphing it out. NASA did have three mainframes, but two of them were at IBM, because IBM did not trust NASA to run them properly. 

We also heard of the Apollo 1 disaster, which caused the deaths of three astronauts by fire. NASA then implemented their new "There is no place for failure" approach. 27 was the average age of the flight team that got Apollo 11 to the surface of the moon with 17 seconds of fuel left. (They almost decided to not land.)  Apollo 12 was struck by lighting during take off, shutting down the entire spacecraft except for booster rockets. They had two minutes to figure out how to solve the problem or else abort the mission. Found an obscure switch that turned telemetry back on. 

During Apollo 13's take off, one engine stopped working. When the crew was 200,000 miles from earth, 50,000 miles from moon, the thermal switch malfunctioned, allowing a spark to explode the liquid oxygen and hydrogen. The two elements were combined to create electricity, water, and oxygen for the crew. Later, we heard about the six things that happened to cause the accident, starting with a contractor's decision to save money by changing the electrical system from 28 volts to 80 volts -- but forgetting to upgrade a thermostat.

(Here's irony: on my flight to San Antonio, I watched Capricorn One, the movie where NASA fakes a flight to Mars.) 

Software
During two keynote sessions, we have heard nothing about SolidWorks, the software. So far, it has just been Dassault products:

- DraftSight, that's been downloaded lots.

- Post3D, a new name for old software that uses creepy avatars to navigate 3D environments. Matt Lombard has been talking about it at www.dezignstuff.com/blog/?p=4456.

- And a kind of apology from the new ceo of SolidWorks for how foggily the SolidWorks-on-the-cloud messaging was handled over the last year. "We read your blogs, and we read the comments on your blogs." There will always be a locally-installed version of SolidWorks, he promised, although I thought I detected an escape clause: "as market conditions dictate." (Paraphrased wording.) This makes sense, for should the number of non-cloud users drop to a few thousand, then it would make no sense to continue updating it.

Each general session has started off with a clever movie that has a western guy and gal seemingly having a shoot-out in the Texan desert. Then they whip out their hands to design paintball guns on invisible CAD systems that seem to sit in the air in front of them. When done designing, they reach into the vaporous system, pull out paint guns, and plaster the side of a building with "SolidWorks World 2011."

Well, apparently we will hear about SolidWorks 2012 on Day 3. I look forward to that.

The under-reported news of SolidWorks World: Graebert Market for DraftSight

A year ago, Graebert was an obscure CAD vendor based in Germany, not far from the famous Kudamm shopping street. I was the only journalist covering them. Then they got lucky: they caught the attention of SolidWorks, who was looking for a replacement to DWGEditor, an AutoCAD workalike. DWGEditor had two big problems: (a) it was based on IntelliCAD, whose development had stalled, and (b) it attracted a law suit from Autodesk because of the "DWG" in its name.

As it turned out, parent company Dassault Systemes took over the marketing and support of what it called DraftSight, a rebadging of Graebert's ARES software. To irritate Autodesk, DraftSight is free, although it is also free of any APIs, even LISP (kind of like AutoCAD LT). If you want to write code for DraftSight, you need to sign up for the $250 a year maintenance contract.

During the keynote address yesterday at SolidWorks World, DraftSight was cited as being the fastest growing CAD system ever, with some 300,000 downloads to date. Later that day, Graebert told me about their plans to make the Graebert name better known, and to have people consider the free DraftSight as a more serious CAD program -- to distinguish it from the likes of AutoCAD LT. The plan is called, "Graebert Market For DraftSight."

The idea is that Graebert will host a site to sell add-ons for DraftSight, and they way they have implemented it is quite clever, DRM-wise:

• This site is meant for DraftSight only; if this one works out, then there may markets for other ARES-based products.
• Add-ons are locked to specific editions of ARES, initially DraftSight. 
• The locking mechanism is called "Connect."
• Connect allows the free version of DraftSight, which has no API, to run add-ons. It also handles licensing, updates, version matching, 30-day trials, and so on. 
• When customers make a purchase (initially with MasterCard and Visa), they are sent the license number by email in a PDF file.- The customer can run multiple add-ons in DraftSight, and can even temporarily turn some off, through the new Plugins command.

For the third-party developer, the process works like this:

• They sign up to a Graebert Developer Account.
• They get access to Graebert Developer Studio, the Windows and OS X SDKs (DRX and LISP for now, others to come in the future, perhaps), documentation, and support at developer.graebertmarket.com.
• Graebert Developer Studio is a customized version of ARES that lets developers test their add-ons.
• Registration is free right now; the later cost is not clear to me, but sounds like it might be something like $99 a year for the first two add-ons.
• The developer sends the plug-in to Graebert for testing and approval. (No source code need be submitted.)  Graebert adds the Connector, and then places it on the Market, as well as sending a copy back to the developer for him to sell on his own site.
• Graebert also checks that the add-on is written correctly, so that it does not clash with other add-ons.

The Market is scheduled to open to the public in early April; Graebert is currently stocking the store. Add-ons can be for any traditional vertical, such as electrical, civil, and mechanical. They can consist of toolbars, application documentation, support videos, free user aids, symbol libraries, and so on.

Graebert Market for DraftSight announces that DraftSight is more than just for geometry creation; indeed, Mr Graebert told me that many apps written for other DWG-based CAD programs are easily ported.

I asked him why SolidWorks is not doing the market. SolidWorks will focus strictly on the MCAD market; however, that does not prevent SolidWorks' own third-party developers from adopting their SolidWorks add-ons for DraftSight.

www.graebertmarket.com

(The links in this article might not be operational, yet.)

[Disclosure: SolidWorks provided me with airfare, hotel accommodation, and some meals.]

ZWCAD previews direct editing in its upcoming ZW3D 2011

ZWCAD posted a video on YouTube showing how direct editing will work in its newly acquired VX 3D CAD/CAM software -- now renamed ZW3D. The video is here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7zW6FYBxtLw

 Here is what they say:

ZWSOFT is now ready to release its next generation 3D SmoothFlow geometry engine. SmoothFlow will make ZW3D the fastest, most effective 3D CAD system available anywhere. [In the video, they claim it is faster than SolidWorks or "Autodesk" -- meaing Inventor, I suppose.] At the foundation of ZW3D software is the uniquely powerful hybrid kernel called ZW Overdrive. This geometry engine seamlessly integrates the speed of solids, the flexibility of wireframe and the power of Class-A surfaces.

Jon Banquer says he would like to see a history tree and an updated user interface. Mudcrab443 says he is impressed that direct editing is almost transparent.

 

 

foto of the sunday: when snow really fell

When I was a kid, snow really fell in my home town in northern Canada. That's me, there, posing at the end of our driveway. The snow got so deep that the telephone company had to come along to dig out their wires. The huge icicles on the yellow house across the stree meant it wasn't insulated well enough.

This year, folks tell me that the deep snow is back again in my home town, except that the municipality lacks the tax revenues to plough streets outside of regular working hours.
Global warming was nice, while it lasted.

(Photograph by my dad, probably around 1966.) 

Update

Here is how the snow looks this winter in the same town (photo credit Jon): 

Upper-date

 Another meter (3') of snow fell on Kitimat overnight on Feb 17. The photo below shows snow piled roof-high in front of this one-storey house. This snow bank is super high due to three reasons: (1) natural snow fall; (2) snow blown there by municipal snow blower trucks; and (3) the homeowner shoveling snow off the roof of his house. In the foreground is a bustop sign.