SolidWorks 2011: Interface bugs from previous versions

For whatever reason, SolidWorks employees working on beta cannot hear you when you tell them about bugs that exist in previous versions. It’s as if its “somebody else’s job” – a sure sign of corporate bureaucracy gone amok. I find this to be one of the most off-putting aspects of the beta program. Especially when bugs reported last year aren’t fixed this year, and they don’t want to hear about it.

In fact, the most common reaction I’ve seen of SW beta folks in general is that their first line of defense is to disprove that you have found a bug at all. This year, I reported a crash and some dimension display problems. The dimension display problems were certainly there for b1 &2, possibly fixed for b3 (sketch dims appeared far away from where placed, remained highlighted, and no other sketch dim could be selected). But whoever I submitted stuff to said they couldn’t see the problem, and closed out my report. After that I didn’t bother reporting anything else.

So I thought I might take a look at some of the bugs that have been around for some time, and see if they still exist in SW2011.

These bugs turn out to be interface bugs, which is relieving in one sense, because at least it isn’t a broken feature, or a crash bug, but annoying in another sense, because you see them all the time.

The first one is that the FeatureManager tabs are obscured under the CommandManager tabs. I think this one has been there since 2008. It’s annoying, is like this for every part you open (until you change the width of the FeatureManager window), and everybody who uses the CommandManager sees it all the time. To me, this makes the software look pretty amateurish, and requires an annoying but easy tweek to get it to display properly.

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I use the detached PropertyManager. Great function, in theory, but it is a thoroughly buggy interface mode. first of all, the Plane PropertyManager sometimes takes 10 seconds to show up the first time it is used in a SW session. And then when it does show up, the control buttons are half blanked out every time. Beyond that, the auto expander does not work, and every time, you have to drag the bottom of the PropertyManager to see the rest of the window. This almost makes the detachable PM unusable for me.

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And then Delete Face. It always shows up scrunched, and always defaults to Delete And Patch instead of remembering what I chose last. So if you don’t want to patch, you always have to expand it and make the selection.

Then there is the OK button.

Notice in the image to the left where the cursor is, and it is highlighting the green check. So way down there, you can click OK. Ok, that’s not entirely awful. But then look at the second image. the cursor is just touching the check, and it is no longer highlighted. This looks like a minor thing, but it isn’t. You can hack and slash at that check mark with the cursor, and maybe by luck you will finally figure out where to click to get it to accept the OK. Again, this is amateurish.

In other interfaces such as Ruled Surface, the OK button is on the RMB, which I think is a brilliant and highly time saving, workflow speeding piece of interface. But unfortunately, the button doesn’t show up over the PropertyManager, or flashes sporadically. It only shows up after you move the cursor off of the PropertyManager, which seems a bit unexpected to me. There is a slight change from 2010 in this behavior, since in 2010 it shows up over the PM, but simply doesn’t work.

Here’s another wonderful productivity enhancement.

This time it is specific to users of multiple monitors. My left monitor is a 24″ wide aspect, my right monitor a 21″ normal aspect. SolidWorks is on the left. When you use the Modify dialog, and move the scroll wheel, when you move the cursor to the left, the cursor shoots all the way to the far right side of the right monitor. Ok, I can see that one is a special case and may be hard to follow, but it has been in the software for a couple of releases, and I know the SW employees who need to know about it already know about it. So why can’t it get fixed instead of revamping the display/appearance/scenes/materials/textures train wreck again?

I’m sure there are more, but these are the ones I deal with on a daily basis. The frustrating part is that they were reported properly in their respective beta test periods, and nothing was done. Yeah, there are workarounds in each case, but they are for the most part obvious problems, and should be easy to fix. Does something like Model Dissection really help my productivity? No, but interface bugs do hurt it.

Late addition: The Undercut Analysis is STILL 100% wrong. Utterly useless, and an unbelievable embarrassment for a company as big as SolidWorks to have such a poor understanding of a major manufacturing process. Inexcusable, really. This has been broken ever since it was introduced, maybe 5 years ago. Never fixed.