More bugs ship in 2009
Do these bugs effect everyone? No. Do they effect me? Yes. You might have run into bugs that don’t effect me. At the best, these inconsistencies are the things that make it difficult to learn new parts of the software on your own. You think you understand how the software works, but they keep changing the rules.
The main victims in this round are video and interface consistency. This is the second release in a row that has obsoleted hardware that is still useful. In this case, my 1 year old laptop cannot be used with all of the functionality.
Granted, this 1 year old laptop has mother board based graphics. I expect that the only price I am going to pay for that is speed in graphics display. Unfortunately, some PropertyManagers like the new SpeedPak and Convert To Sheet Metal PropertyManagers do not display at all on this computer. This happens whether the PM is docked or undocked, and don’t refresh even if moved around.
Another bit of unexpected limitation is the new Change Curve or Sketch Color function. This got caught up in the whole Color/Appearance mess, and they spun it off as a separate icon and renamed the function. You can now change the color of curves, except for Projected Curves. Helices and all the other curve types work, but not (for me) the most often used type. Another odd limitation is that you can’t preselect. It seems like SW has a fresh crop of coders who don’t understand what makes SolidWorks SolidWorks. Preselect or Post select, Click Click or Click Drag options are both victims in this 2009 release. These are long standing established practice in the software which I don’t think are ready to be thrown aside as old fashioned yet. It’s not clear if these are bugs or “working as designed”.
The new Freeform feature removed limitations is a great step forward. The problem I’ve run into is that with the simplest non-4 sided patch causes a self intersection error and some really odd results. If you make a circular split line on say a sphere, rotate the grid, and use Freeform to tug and pull, it gives you a self intersection error and shows only the tips of the 4 sided patch it uses behind the scenes.
Sometimes the feature in the tree will wind up with a little exclamation mark, and sometimes not. It was like this also for changes to the Fill surface for 2007. Later in the release it was fixed.
I welcome the new functionality, but I want it to be useful when it arrives, I don’t need a research project every time something goes wrong.
Another problem is overlapping with the CommandManager and the FeatureManager tabs at certain points in the workflow. This was another one that SW beta support techs dismissed as non-existent. I have time to beta test because of other things I’m doing with beta, but I don’t have time to argue with people who assume that I’m wrong.
To fix it, I just change the width of the FM panel slightly. Notice also that the FM filter is chopped off on the ends. This is also my imagination, according to beta support. Anyone else see this?
And the final one for today is the color changing on save, again denied by SW beta support. Boy, I should’ve been in the top 10 beta testers with all of these bug-non-bugs.
Of these, the Freeform is the most serious, but the ignoring of established practice is the part that worries me most.
Next time, a stroll through the Help files to see what has become of the new SW initiative to improve the Help.
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I’ll just keep adding bugs to this post rather than making new posts.
Here’s one I found today, very annoying. If you have a sketch picture in a sketch, and you are editing the sketch, not the picture, and you happen to click and drag as if to box select something, the first time you click and drag, it exits the sketch, the second time you do it (because you think you made a mistake the first time), it deletes your sketch picture. That’s a lovely one, especially when the sketch picture is difficult to size and position.
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Add to the list of PropMgrs I can’t see with this computer:
– Delete Face
– Split Entities