Bug of the Week

In an effort to draw attention to bugs that aren’t anyone’s imagination, and with the eventual hope of getting some things fixed, I’m going to start posting my Bug Of The Week award for the bug that has cost me the most time/money or sheer aggravation this particular week.I welcome folks to nominate your own bugs of the week.

The bug that has cost me the most time this week is not yet a confirmed bug, and I’m going to give SolidWorks people the opportunity to respond to the report I sent in first. Let’s just say that my experience with RealView in SW08sp2.0ev has been less than stellar.

Anyway, my second choice for Bug Of The Week for this week is unique to 2008, and was reported in Beta, but as of SP2.0ev, it is still there. When you access the Modify Sketch tool, the Modify Sketch origin that allows you to mirror and move sketches quickly flashes on the screen for a fraction of a second, and then disappears. If you put your cursor where it flashed and you’re lucky, you can get the correct cursor icon to show up that enables you to mirror the sketch.

That’s the bug of the week for this week. I’m less tolerant of bugs in the software when the developers are putting in functionality that doesn’t work or doesn’t help me. For example, the AutoTrace function would have been a good thing, but instead it’s just another gimmick that has a name but doesn’t work. I would certainly trade that useless gew-gaw in return for a Modify Sketch that doesn’t get buggered between releases. SolidWorks – try to see things through the eyes of people who use the software to make a living.

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Update: The Real View problem turned out to be a corrupted file. The file was corrupted by a crash caused by RealView. Of course we can’t trace the source of the crash to anything you can submit to tech support, but the corruption is real. It makes internal edges always visible, the model is some flat shade of gray, the XYZ triad in the lower left turns black, and some faces are transparent, and lights seem to shine in the wrong direction, appear to be far away and pointed in the wrong direction, and go dark when you turn on Lock To Model.
So I guess I’ll make this Bug Of The Week for last week.
The good news is that the model geometry is not messed up.
To this point, this bug has cost me 4 hours of work, between recovering from the crash, trying to fix the corruption on my own, reporting the bug and following up with tech support. Invoice to appear shortly.

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