WorldCAD Access

At 1.6 million seats, is SolidWorks leaving Inventor in the dust?

We may never know. Last year, Autodesk ceo Carl Bass banned seat counts for his company's software packages. The decision is now handicapping the company in the seat counts propaganda war, as they are unable to respond to the astounding numbers being whooped up by SolidWorks...

One Million Seats! - end of January 2011 in April 2009.

One Point Six Million Seats! - end of August 2011

Two Million Seats!
-take a guess when this will occur, teases DS SolidWorks ceo Bertrand Sicot.

Let's take a closer look at what the number consists of. As experienced seat observers know, the number is pretty much always inflated by education seats. In the case of Autodesk, the edu number is somewhat meaningless, for Autodesk gives away Inventor to students and faculty for free.

In the case of DS SolidWorks, however, the edu software is sold, although we have no idea at what price.

At this week's Media Day, DS SolidWorks provided us with some greater details of the seat count numbers, and they look like this:

• 1,589,600 total seats
• 1,127,4oo educational seats
• 462,200 commercial seats

 Some more details. SolidWorks sells between 35,000 and 50,000 seats a year, with 24,201 sold in the first half of this year.

For the last five quarters, sales increased by just over 20% each quarter -- following negative growth during the recession.

The average selling price is just over $8,000 and has increased slightly over the last 3.5 years. This is the total of all sales by dealers divided by the number of copies sold -- and not the revenue per seat that DS SolidWorks makes (which would be a number smaller by 20-40%.) It shows that most customers are not buying basic SolidWorks but one of the more expensive, bundled packages. Execs confirmed that the split is roughly 40/40/20 for their high-mid-low priced offerings of SolidWorks, with a slight emphasis for the mid-priced one.

The largest sales are in Europe, but the fastest growing region are developing companies, especially Brazil. The break down is:

• Americas = 37%
• Asia Pacific = 21%
• EMEA (Europe, Middle East, Africa) = 42%

More details in this week's upFront.eZine, due out on Friday.

www.solidworks.com

 

 

IMSI/Design powers TurboViewer up to Pro level

When IMSI/Design first told me about their DWG viewer for iOS, they promised to make "an announcement of significance every month" for the next several months.

The first one was about TurboViewer, and that it displays actual vector DWG files in 2D and 3D on iPads. In contrast, Autodesk's AutoCAD WS displays 2D only, and then only a rasterized version. (You can see the blur briefly when you zoom in.)

The second was releasing the same software officially on iPhone and iPod Touch. The software is free from Apple's iTunes store.

The third is coming this week, with the release of the Pro version. Not free, but $9.99 introductory.

3D, layers, iPad
(Image provided by IMSI/Design) 

For the price, you get the following extra features:

• Layer Manager that turns layers on and off -- individually or all at one -- and inverts visibility of layers.
  
  
• Visual styles, including hidden line, X-ray shaded, shaded with edges, and so on.
  
  
• Adjust visual styles to change edge color (white, gray, black), change X-ray transparency, use default or model lighting, and force two sided rendering.
  
  
• Full screen mode, without ads
  
  
• Options to display low memory warning, and to toggle the 2D/3D autosense navigation.
  
  
• Available in 16 languages. 

On iPad, iPhone, and iTouch. So that's this month's monthly announcement. IMSI/Design gave me a sneak peak at next month's release, which'll add --.

www.imsidesign.com/TurboViewer

Visual style settings, iPhone

 

Now updated: "What's Inside? AutoCAD 2012" ebook

When each year I write my What's Inside? AutoCAD ebooks, there is stuff I miss -- things not immediately apparent when working with the beta software. In the months following, readers of the ebook and me find more things that are new and different from the previous release, and so I issue a second edition.

Last week I found time to update What's Inside? AutoCAD 2012 with corrections from Bill Fane of Canada and Ignacio Arrúe of Spain. (If you sent me corrections and I didn't mention your name, my apologies. The Inbox of my email software got corrupted some months ago, and I lost some emails, perhaps yours.)

The changes are easy to spot: the text is in gray, as shown below. 

Anyone who purchased the ebook before last Wednesday (24 August) is welcome to a free copy of the updated ebook. Just contact me.

To purchase your copy, click the link below, and then make payment by PayPal or cheque. Instructions at the ebook's Web page:

What's Inside? AutoCAD 2012, Second Edition

$12.00

 

 

You no longer need a monster Dell as your portable CAD workstation

I've been in classrooms that sport monster 17" Dell "workstation-class" laptop computers at each desk for learning CAD. The problem with 17-inchers is that they aren't very portable; the huge power supply brick Dell uses would on its own tip your luggage overweight.

With a two-week stint in Manila coming up, I needed a portable workstation of my own, with the emphasis on portable. My current laptop is a 10" netbook from LG that is fabulous for word processing (best keyboard evah!), doing the Web, running Linux, and is several years old. I knew I had a problem when I tried installing Office 2007, and the installer complained of insufficient memory!

So I went casting about to see what kind of performance was possible in something with a 14" screen or smaller, and without breaking the bank. For an example of breaking the bank, there is, for example, a 13" Sony available from London Drugs on sale for $1,350. The aluminum body and backlit keyboard are desirable, but not at that premium.

Mike's Computers had an interesting one for $599, but they were out of stock.

I tried Staples next, since the last few times I found the right computer at the right price with them, such as my current desktop, an Acer. They had three possibilities for my needs, each one $150 more expensive than the next. After some hemming and hawing, I went with the cheapest of the lot, an Acer with a sticker price of $629.

Feature List 

Here's what the Acer 3830GT came with:

• 4GB RAM, expandable to 8.
• 2.1MHz, four-core i3 CPU
  
  
• Integrated HD graphics from Intel
• A second graphics board, a 1GB Nvidia Geforce GT540M
• 13.3" screen with 1360x768 resolution
  
  
• 750GB hard drive
• Dolby-tuned speakers that sound great for such small speakers
• A proper multi-touch trackpad (by "proper" I mean that it has real buttons)
  
  
• Two USB v2 ports, and a third one that does USB v2, v3, and is always powered, even when the computer is turned off
• Bluetooth, wireless N, ethernet, 1.3megapixel webcam, HDMI and VGA output, mic, audio connectors, SD card reader.
• 8-hour battery

All this in a package that's about 1" thick, and weighs about four pounds.

It has a couple more extras that are cute. A "P" button instantly switches between power saver and powerful modes, when on battery. The battery LED is a button; when on battery, the LED is off, to save even more power; press the button to see the charge level. The battery is not removable, and so there is a small hole for "resetting" it, like pulling the battery to reset a stubborn operating system.

Price 

All this for $629, sticker price.

When I went to pay for it, however, the cash register rang up $599. The following Wednesday, the Staples flyer came out, and the price was down to $549. I immediately drove to the store to get my "price protection" refund, and the cashier rang up a sale price of $529. Sweet.

The Drawbacks

The computer has a few drawbacks. No DVD drive, although I have an external one I can use.

 Initially the Bluetooth did  not work. I followed instructions at Acer's Web site about uninstalling and reinstalling the drivers, but no luck. I contacted Acer tech support, who had me do a few things, which got it half working: other devices, like my cell phone, could see the Acer, but the Acer could not see any Bluetooth devices, like mouse or cell phone.

At one point, tech support instructed me to reboot the computer, and so we lost contact. When I returned to tech support, I had a new guy, who asked if the computer is under warranty. "Yes," I said, "I just bought it today." In that case, he declared, there was no problem with the hardware, and so I would need to pay for further support.

In the meantime I found that the keyboard was a pain. The key travel is shallow, to be expected for a thin computer. But the left Shift key was split in half to make room for some French quotation marks. I kept hitting quotation marks instead of Shift.

Between the keyboard flaw, the non-working Bluetooth, and the demand for payment from Acer support, I was annoyed enough to bring back the computer the next morning. Problem was, I had spent the evening looking for a replacement, and I just could not find a laptop with better price/performance.

At Staples the next morning, the techie showed me that all laptops in Canada now have the split Shift key. This is the fault of separatists in Quebec, who demand that the rest of Canada be English-French bilingual, yet ban the use of English in Quebec. To keep Quebec in Canada, the old Liberal government gave into the demands of the separatists, and as a result we are now stuck with awful bilingual keyboards. Lesson learned: don't give into separatists.

The techie found the Bluetooth problem fascinating, and proceeded to work on it. Long story short, he spent six hours at it, finally getting to the point where he wiped the drive clean, and then reinstalled the OS and support software. It was then that he found that one Bluetooth utility program had not been present following the factory install, and so got it working. No charge.

Memory for Nothing and Chips for Free

My daughter has taken over the MacBook I bought a year ago. I was dismayed to see how slowly programs loaded, and how long the Apple product took to just even switch between applications. I figured I should upgrade it from 2GB to 4GB RAM, but hesitated at the $100 cost.

With my new computer, however, I saw my chance:

- I took the two 2GB memory cards out of my new Acer, and found they worked just fine in her MacBook. (Acer and MacBook have identical memory specs.) One memory upgrade completed for free.

- I searched the Internet for two 4GB memory cards to put into my new Acer. First site I checked was futureshop.ca, who had the memory on sale for 60% off -- $30 each. I raced to the store, but the peg was empty. I looked around the store for other memory that might work -- and found one card I was looking for on another peg, and the second card on yet another one. Last two $30 modules in my entire home town! The RAM came to $60, but then a few days later, I got a $70 refund from Staples, as noted earlier. Two memory upgrades completed for free.

So the Acer 3830GT now has 8GB RAM with another 8GB ReadyBoost. Let me tell you, AutoCAD loads just like that!

 

More free Creo software from PTC

First PTC released Creo Sketch 1.0 as free software, and yesterday Creo Elements/Direct Modeling Express 4.0 followed. Now, this is not exactly new-new, because this software always has been free -- it was previously known as "CoCreate Personal Edition."

Now it's been Creo-ized, and you can download it from www.ptc.com/products/creo-elements-direct/modeling-express/. This page has some tutorials, and lists the differences with the paid version.

Ken Wong has a good review of the software over at www.deskeng.com/virtual_desktop/?p=4238 . Not mentioned in his report is that you need to activate the software before you can use it at all; before you can activate it, you have to register with PTC; to do that, you need to create an account with PTC. So no 30-day hassle-free trial on this one.

 

Some nosedive, ADSK, PMTC!

What is with the share price of US public CAD vendors? (chart credit: yahoo.com).

Here's Autodesk: 

 

And here's PTC:

Our quicky review of SpaceClaim 2011+

On our second conference call, Justin Hendrickson showed me some of the features new to SpaceClaim 2011+.

Firstly, sheet metal. You can now select parts in a model and SpaceClaim turns them into sheet metal parts; the software recognizes them by their thinness. It notices sharp corners and turns them into bends, and so on. It creates tabs that connect one piece of sheet metal at 90 degrees to another; creates sheet metal hinges from cutting and bending the sheet metal walls, automatically. (This las one avoids a real hinge and the screws that would otherwise be needed.) See figure below.

The company credits Trumpf (one of the world’s largest producers of sheet metal fabricating equipment) for teaching them which features to add to sheet metal design. For instance, you can now drag a piece of sheet metal to make a double-wall (folded over against itself); when you fold over a piece of sheet metal, SpaceClaim recognizes it as a hem; and you can add gussets for strength. And the unfolding of the sheet metal design:

There is a new ribbon tab for creating holes. The hole info is maintained as a smart object, so it can be edited parametrically later.

Patterns (arrays) are moved out of the Move tool, and is now its own command; new release also has previews of patterns.

"For a SpaceClaim users, GrabCAD is just gold, because you can grab models in any format and work with them."

Volume capping: need to create a solid that represents the interior volume for fluid dynamics. Problem is finding all leaks. New feature allows you to get SpacClaim to find leaks, which you can then close off. (This feature is also used to seal off the inside to protect IP when sharing the drawing with others.)

Many new selection techniques. Select all instances of a part; select by color, and so on. Can cut a model using planes to look at the interior; can also use multiple planes, rotate the planes, and so on.

Q&A

WorldCAD Access: Does SpaceClaim do any parametrics?

Mr Hendrickson: Can set up driving dimensions. So not like a parametric CAD system where EVERY feature is stored, only important ones are stored. For example, a slot has to be a certain distance anmd angle from an edge, you can apply the dimensional constraints. These are saved as groups. You can leave the rest of the model alone.


WorldCAD Access: You mentioned that the driving dimensions can be controlled by an analysis program. How does this work?

Mr Hendrickson: You can do that inside ANSYS, or you can use SpaceClaim's APIs. Other vendors can read the data and act on it.

Optimus and modeFRONTIER sit on top of solvers and manage simulation runs between multiple CAE programs, such as one solver for fluid flow, another for heat simulation. This allows SpaceClaim to work with more solvers, although direct integration will increase.

http://www.spaceclaim.com

GstarSOFT's First iPad Release Creates and Edits CAD Drawings

ZWSOFT and GstarSOFT of China became successful on the back of IntelliCAD, creating me-too CAD software that looked a lot like AutoCAD. That was just the base, their warmup act.

Last year, ZWSOFT bought VX of Florida, USA, and turned it into ZW3D, their 3D solid modeler and CAM [computer aided manufacturing] software. The company is busy updating the program a couple of times a year.

And this week GstarSOFT released their first CAD program for  iPads, GstarCAD MC, where "MC" is short for mobile client. Written in-house, it creates and edits CAD drawings, as illustrated below.
 

You can download GstarCAD MC free from the iTunes store here.

(The catch is that the program uses the OCF format, so you have to use the latest version of the company's GstarCAD for Windows to convert DWG files to and from OCF; sync drawing files with iTunes. Download a demo version of the desktop CAD system with OCF translator here.)

upFront.eZine will feature an interview with Huang Meiyu (vice president and oversea business director) in our September 2 issue.

http://en.gstarcad.com/product.php?id=8 

How does everyone gain market share in a mature market?

Who's really gaining market share?

When you listen to certain CAD ceos, you would think that all of them are gaining market share. That's where everybody gets a bigger slice -- of what? At Autodesk's conference call with financial analysts last week, Walter Pritchard of Citigroup wanted to know how "everybody" could be increasing the size of their slice.

Mr Pritchard: "We talked to other players in the space. Everybody sort of claims that they're gaining share, and defending turf, or expanding into new turf -- mostly around manufacturing. (In the AEC space, not so much contended.) But just curious, is it market industry estimates? Or is it your own work? O is it anecdotal that convinces you're gaining share in manufacturing. Just a little bit more detail on that would be helpful."

Carl Bass, Autodesk ceo: "I always find this slightly amusing. That mathematical fact is the subject of so much argument by anecdote. It seems much better to go back to the math. I think there are only two ways to look at market share: One is you can look at the number of seats, and the other is to look at the amount of revenue.

"I think if you do the math by those measures on any apples-to-apples comparison, I think that's where my comments come from. So I always find it amusing when somebody says, 'Our CAD business is growing by [a rather small] 3%, but we're gaining share'. I just don't know the how that's mathematically possible."

Seeking Alpha

In 2007, we laughed at SpaceClaim; well, laugh no longer as the company starts talking "displacements"

Justin Hendrickson joined company spokesman Blake Courter to talk with me about what's new in the mid-year release of SpaceClaim, numbered "2011+." Mr Hendrickson is a new project manager, and is in charge of who gets what in the product. He was due to give the demo, but then GoToMeeting spontaneously shut down repeatedly. We resorted to POTS [plain old telephone system].

Mr Courter didn't chortle, but he could have, as he recounted when the company launched in 2007 it effectively "re-invented" direct modeling -- even though the technology had been around for decades. "FUD [from competitors] is a tactic for the short term, but is not a strategy for the long term," he said, recounting how people [like me] didn't think the nascent startup stood a chance.

"People think of CAD startups as Jacob's Ladder, where they start at the low end and then work their way to the high end, like Catia. More 'recent' entries, like SolidWorks and Pro/E, can't; SolidWorks because of limitaitons in the dealer channel, Pro/E because of technology limitations." Throughout the talk, I noticed that one competitor was never mentioned: Autodesk.

"We are seeing success, because of accounts in the higher end lacking tools that we could provide." For the first time, SpaceClaim spokesmen are using the word "displacement." Previously, the company insisted its software merely complimented existing CAD systems; prior to today, much had been made of the claim that SpaceClaim helped conceptualize and prepare models in pre-CAD and post-CAD stages. With 2011+, it's repositioned as a 3D CAD system in its own right.

In this phone call, Mr Courter acknowledged that shop floors are now using SpaceClaim for design, such as of moulds. "Pro/E and SolidWorks are overkill for small tasks. With SpaceClaim, users don't have to worry about parent-child dependencies regenerating in the correct order." Or waiting for the regenerations to occur. 

"It is fair to say that we are being more aggressive in this release as we see how our software is being used in the market." Indeed, new features in 2011+ are oriented towards detail design work, such as hole tables and the output of drawings and details.

When it comes to sheet metal design, Mr Courter scoffed that "most other CAD systems are only 80% of the way; they say 'We have enough sheet metal in here and our customers can go the rest of the way'." SpaceClaim wants to go all the way: "There is a need for a heck of lot more design with sheet metal, like double walls and hinge creation. If these were at the tip of your fingers, then you would use them, instead of creating them manually." 

I found it interesting that SpaceClaim is aiming for 100% of the sheet metal designer's needs, because later Mr Courter showed me a chart in which customers self-reported their uses of SpaceClaim. Sheet metal design was near the bottom of the list, employed by a mere 18% of customers (who were allowed to choose more than one activity). Well, maybe that's the job for the new Mr Henderson. What they actually use SpaceClaim for: the top uses (40% or more) are concept modeling, model preparation for simulation, and CAD data translation.

SpaceCaim 2011+ (I keep wanting to write Space 2001) now handles JT with PMI. "Nearly every car maker has mandated using JT for data exchange. Siemens has does a great job of creating a rich format. We can claim to have to the best JT editor on the market: it's easy to use as a viewer, but can do what-if editing with parts and create new specifications."

Simulation, however, continues to be handled by partners, such as ANSYS. But one wonders when this wall also will fall.

The software boasts improved performance through greater use of multi-threading. You can expect a 3.2x increase in faceting performance with a 6-core CPU.

www.spaceclaim.com