So What’s New in the last 5 Years?

For those of you who weren’t aware, or possibly just didn’t care, I was away for 4 years while I learned about other tools and other users. Prior to that I had a SolidWorks related web presence since at least 2002, possibly since 1997, I don’t really remember any more.

When I started getting involved in SolidWorks stuff again last year, there were a lot of things that had changed. Sometimes when you’re too close to something, you can’t see the changes without stepping back.

Community

The first thing I noticed was that the community was different. New faces. Some old faces too, but a new generation of leaders had emerged. The SW Forum was still full of some of the old dynamic asking and answering questions, but it has taken on a bit of a different vibe. The “points” thing seemed to have made some people into rabid posters, but that doesn’t seem to be so much in play right now. When a new question hits, especially one of the softballs typically sent up by new users, like “How do I move the origin”, or “Why isn’t SolidWorks like AutoCAD”, the water seems to boil with people super-eager to answer. Unless you’re watching it closely, it’s hard to get into a thread with fewer than half a dozen responses.

The blog part of the community – I mean independent blogs, not the ones on the SW site – has really changed. All the old home-grown blogs are mostly gone, or post once a year at SWWorld or a new release or something. I think the home-grown writing was important because you got a chance to really hear from users about what users thought was important. Especially when they kept it to talking about functionality in the software, or how they used it – you know, the more technical side. Things tended to go south when we got involved in topics beyond that, if you know what I mean.

The Product

SolidWorks the product has changed a little in the last 4 years. Another icon color change, and yet another renderer (massive eye roll), a few things added to the software (like CAM) that might be important to others but not to me personally. I noticed a few of my enhancement requests found their way into the software, like the saved selections (!!), straight history list display, the relationship viewing arrows, Freeze bar, mostly stuff that makes dealing with history more tolerable.

Some of the better interface improvements I’ve already listed in another post. Stuff like the breadcrumbs, Enter to repeat, initial sketch scaling, cool selection methods. Renaming parts from the FeatureManager. Copy with mates, make independent, replace components… yum. I like that stuff.

Some changes for the not-so-better as well. Like Midpoint snapping. We tried that a long time ago, and it was not popular. I know it can be turned off, but please, the default settings are SO important in how people perceive the software. Lose the midpoint snaps by default. Whatever is going on with selecting SW windows from the Windows taskbar is not an improvement. The floor reflections setting keeps turning itself back on (it wouldn’t upset me if they revisited the whole backgrounds interface again – the interface doesn’t allow the kind of control I want). Also, speaking of defaults, the Zoom to fit when changing to standard views is not a good default. Change the view and lose you zoom state without hitting F (zoom to fit)? Not good.

And of course some things that still need to be fixed, like centerlines on mirrored cylindrical features on drawings are still displayed improperly. Throwing the cursor to the far display when using those wheel things in interface to scroll numbers. The SW Search still doesn’t find a lot of stuff I am looking for explicitly. Not sure what to say here. I think the new eye icons are kinda creepy. The new hide/show in particular has taken some time to get used to.

The one thing that really strikes me is that they seem to be done with big changes to the software. It’s a downhill coast now. Onshape really had to break off, because it might be impossible to do anything really innovative with SolidWorks at this point. To me, even Onshape didn’t go far enough. If you haven’t looked at it, Onshape does have some cool stuff, but they didn’t make enough innovations in the area that most needed innovation – history-based modeling. Cloud is just IT. The Onshape business model prevents you from getting benefits locally that they implement in the cloud. IT innovations don’t do much for design tools. Really, we need to learn to do something other than history-based modeling. It’s an icky mess. I don’t know why you guys don’t see that.

Anyway, mini-rant off.

The Company

When I bailed on SW 5 years ago, there was a lot of turmoil. And I think there had been some bad decisions. It seems to me, as more of an outsider now than I was then, that the company has backed off some of the plans that were causing users to become restless. You don’t hear as much from the company, even in the Forum. Many of the original people had already left by the time I bailed, and even more of them are gone now. It’s very different from what it was 20 – or even 15 years ago, even 6 years ago. You used to see a lot of personal charisma from employees, which I think is all but gone now. At least I’m not seeing it.

Me

I may have changed some in the past 5 years too. I’ve certainly stepped back from the rock star status that I seemed to have accidentally acquired from riding the wave of that SW user uprising years ago. I’m a little more careful, a little more focused on what’s really important, possibly less naive, but that might be debatable. I’ve learned that people don’t follow the same ethics in business that they follow in their personal lives, and they find a way to be ok with that. That’s kind of despicable.

Anyway, just wanted to give a little update from the perspective of someone who stepped away for a while