Enhancements in Over-The-Hill Software

Ageism is really a terrible thing. I’ve never been self-conscious about my age until a couple of years ago. I feel energetic, mentally agile, able to form unconventional ideas, vital. But there are certain values that are considered “old” these days, like a need for ownership, rock-and-roll, firm sexual identity, a desire to get far far away from the urban crush, and independence. It’s not that I’m getting old, I’m convinced. It’s that other younger ones are coming after me with ideas that are different, and corrosive to the establishment generation. Sometimes it’s hard to see how kids will survive themselves.

One of the advantages of being old having been around a long time is the advantage of perspective. You have seen more than one thing, so you know more than one thing. The computer age seems to have sped up our concept of time to some degree, because, with the PC age having been born in the 1980s, stuff changes fast when its new. Software, hardware, what are we supposed to expect from it all. Stand alone machines evolve to mainframes with terminals, evolve back to personal computers, and then back to centralized computation and data in a land that supposedly values individuality above almost anything.

1995 was a long time ago. The internet was really just firing up, it hadn’t yet been overrun by crass marketing and mega-corporations. It was before 9/11, and the Dot Com bubble, so it was more naive, optimistic, hopeful. Change came fast, people were obsessed with “the first ever” whatever it was. CAD itself had a history, but modern, 3-dimensional, retail for the masses computer aided design was really just being born.

There are some people who do not appear to have noticed that SolidWorks software is getting old. They are mostly people who are new to the software in the last few years. The funny thing is that they are doing exactly the kinds of things that prominent users were doing 15-20 years ago. Just replay some of the crusades we waged in those days, and you will find them being recreated on the SolidWorks forum right now.

The things we did back then were at least possible for a relatively young software package, and development team. But now, in 2018, the initial developers of the software are all long gone. They have been replaced by custodians, those who will maintain the software into its retirement. They are probably going to keep it going for as long as they can without big rewrites.

But expecting those kind of changes now to software that is 23 years old is just not realistic. Sheet metal was added in a service pack a long time ago. You won’t find that big a change happen to the software now in an entire release. If you read all of my “What’s New” posts for 2018, there really wasn’t much compared to a What’s New from say 2001.

This is all brought up by the Top Ten List currently running on the SolidWorks site. There are some very appropriate enhancement requests up there, and some that are fully unrealistic.

There are some great enhancement requests, like adding excel formulas to Global Variables, allowing certain features to affect multiple bodies (some like fillets can’t do this right now).

And then some of the requests are for things that already exist in the software. For example, one person thinks adding the Circular Profile option to the Sweep feature was a good idea, and wants the addition of a hollow tube. The hollow tube already exists if you know how to use the Thin Feature option. I just wish people would understand what they’re asking for before they submit.

Or some that might require a philosophical rework like allowing zero thickness geometry on solids. This might be possible, but I wouldn’t want it at the expense of a lot of development or at the expense of model quality.

Sometimes you even come across users who submit enhancement requests that directly contradict one another. I’ve got to give SolidWorks credit for mostly getting the enhancements right. When they make a mistake, they generally hear about it pretty quickly, but they get a lot of bad advice from users in the form of requests that are just plain wacky, and somehow sort through that fairly well.