SolidWorks 2008: Assemblies
Multiple parts can be copied with mates, so a screw and washers can be copied to multiple locations and mated correctly into place easily.
Selection
Subassemblies can be selected by RMB on a part of the subassy and select Select Subassembly from the RMB menu.
CosmosMotion, Physical Simulation and Animator now use a single set of tools instead of completely different tools for doing similar things. Animator has also been moved down to the base SolidWorks package, so it is no longer necessary to have SW Office Pro to use Animator.
Hole AlignmentThere is a new tool called Hole Alignment which will help you find misaligned holes in an assembly.Virtual ComponentsThere is a new tool called Hole Alignment which will help you find misaligned holes in an assembly.Virtual Components are components that can be added at the assembly level, and never exist as separate files. This is great for stuff like grease, paint, and other non-geometrical items which are added to assemblies and need to be accounted for in the BOM. In fact, a new BOM column exists which is called “unit of measure” so that if you have 3 virtual components of paint, and the units of measure could be listed as gallons, pounds, coats or square feet. Personally I still like the idea of parts from a library rather than local parts created inside an assembly. Virtual parts created in an assembly can also have geometry, and can be saved outside of the assembly. One of the implications of this is that an in-context part can be created without naming it immediately, and it can be saved with a name or even simply renamed within the assembly later.
Cool stuff. Flexibility is a good thing.
Layouts (Documentation Rant)
The Help and What’s New are constrained to use a minimum number of words. Screen shots including interface verbage are kept to a minimum in the help and also in the training manuals (I mean, knowing what the interface looks like isn’t very important when you’re describing how to use it, is it?). This is probably to keep overall production and translation costs and times down, but the result is that they might as well save their time. The Help on this topic of Layouts is pretty “sketchy”. After reading it, I’m left very unclear about exactly what it does and how it works.
Is it fair to expect the What’s New and Help files to be ready to go for Beta software? I think one requirement for beta to be available to the public is that the What’s New be complete. If the What’s New references the Help, then the Help must also be complete. Each new function should be fully documented with an example. Selling CAD software is a costly but also lucrative endeavor. If you’re in the business there’s a minimum amount of work you are expected to do. You hear SolidWorks employees talking a lot about “discoverability”, which is the ability of the user to figure out how to use a function in the complete lack of instruction or documentation. Documentation is just overhead. Or on the other hand, is it possibly the one thing that gives value to the software where otherwise it would have none? If users don’t know that functions exist, then the programmers may as well save their time and not write them. There is no advantage to putting functionality in the software and not letting people know about it.
If someone were to make a mistake and put me in charge, I would do things differently. The Product Managers who hash out and negotiate the functionality of each new feature/function would have a written specification for the desired functionality, including a sample storyboard for how it works. This would be like a product that gets developed by any other company with a professional product development process. The developer would then develop against that specification. The documentation then becomes easy, because it is already framed, and doesn’t have to be written as a hurried after-product, reverse engineering the software to describe the function. The specification may need to be translated out of tech jargon into end user language, but it is complete and descriptive. In a case like that you really could hire simple tech writers instead of SolidWorks experts to write the end user documentation. The final documentation needs to in the end be edited by a real SW user and a language major. Software documentation is all about content. If there is no content, it may as well not even exist. How can a company who’s entire business is built on product design documentation, be so bad at documenting their own product’s design? End of today’s rant.
I guess you can’t avoid a few stinkers, but assemblies have lots of new stuff that will be helpful. I think it may have been a mistake for SolidWorks to allow us to blog about this version in such an early state. It’s certainly not ready for close scrutiny. This report probably should have been put off until prerelease.