Whoa, Nelly! SolidWorks 2008 Beta

I admit. I’m kinda a sucker for new stuff. It’s just the curiosity. I want to see if they have fixed any of my big issues. Fortunately I’ve got a job where it doesn’t matter what release I use, and for some of the things I do I actually do need to be looking at the new stuff. Maybe I’m just getting old (the second anniversary of my 39th birthday was a few months ago), but all of these new versions keep running together. I still refer to the “base flange” method in sheet metal as the “new” way. I can’t remember how far back it was that they fixed flexible subassemblies so that they didn’t need configurations anymore. They’ve fixed and broken splines and lofts so many times I can’t keep track of where we are now.

And now they’re at it again. SolidWorks just announced that sign-up for 2008 Beta testing is active. Didn’t we just finish with a too-short beta cycle for 2007? I guess it could be worse, we could go years without significant improvements…. But that brings up another point. Does “new” really mean “improved“? That’s hard to say. In every release there are some new things that I’m really glad showed up. In 07 my list of favorites included the improvements to the Fit surface, splines, display states, PackAndGo, default Photoworks settings, and a few others. Other people have different lists of favorites, which is why SolidWorks sometimes seems to be all over the map with enhancements – because users have contradictory ideas of things that would be great to have in the software. For example, someone obviously thought the new SW Explorer interface was a great idea, but I have to admit that I’m completely lost when I open it up.

I definitely have mixed feelings about another new version so soon. There are the perrenial things that don’t get fixed – 3D sketch relations, 3D sketch planes, any sketch relations involving splines ellipses or parabolas, the Undercut Checker, mate solving, error messages, annoying popup dialogs, consistent use of the Esc key in various functions, any operations involving curves (move, copy, offset, etc.), especially when it comes to absorbed curves and feature order or rollback states. I know some of these are dark and dusty corners of the software that not everybody uses, but still, they all are worthy, especially the sketch and mate issues, and the whole curves topic which hasn’t even been touched in several years. Inevitably these will be passed over in preference for ______ (insert something you didn’t ask for here).

My more serious concern is that SolidWorks is taking a page out of the Microsoft playbook. With Vista, and less so with previous versions, Windows is taking a decided twist to the non-functional “eye candy” side of things. From the publicly available 2008 previews from SolidWorks World, it looks like SolidWorks is going the same direction. Consumer product glitz. Please, save that for Cosmic Blobs, which is the mass market fluff. SolidWorks is still an engineering tool, and you should apply the powder puff very sparingly. Come on. Don’t waste development time on that. Really.

The worst part about it for me is that in the last year and a half, I’ve bought 2 new computers, both with what were at the time top end graphics cards. Both of these cards are now on the “works, but not recommended” list for 2008. I’m assuming this is all due to the new eye candy, which is not going to help me get my job done. I keep hearing from SolidWorks that they listen to customers and that most of the enhancements come from users. Actions speak louder than words, though. They must only be tuned to a frequency used by graphic artists rather than the meat-and-potatoes users. Most folks want faster performance, and what is being delivered is graphics glitz that chews performance and makes great video cards obsolete as fast as Vista chews double the RAM of XP.

So does new really mean improved? It’s too late to influence this version. It seems it’s always too late to influence the direction. All we can do is sit back and see what it brings (and try really really hard not to grin and pump a fist in the air when something fantastic shows up).

I think it was the president of PTC who once famously said that all the major questions in CAD have been answered. Well, that was just because he was getting his ass kicked in the CAD market and wanted to move focus to PLM. Kind of reminiscent of the faux pas of global proportions made by the chief of the Patent Office in the late nineteenth century who said something to the effect that everything that was patentable had already been patented, and he was planning to shut down the office. Truth be told, CAD is an immature market, which we know because things change so quickly. It’s not so much the design side of things, but the computer automation. Where is it going to stop? How far should it go? There was an essay on MCAD Cafe recently that won a contest that asked the question if CAD is actually decreasing the quality of our daily lives.

Beyond this, I always get the sense that the beta period is far too short. Most of the bugs I submit during beta don’t get fixed by SP0. This is frustrating. Why have beta if you aren’t going to fix the bugs by SP0? Nothing is so urgent that the software has to be released to the public with that many bugs in it. It used to be just old cranky crackpots said that you shouldn’t install any release of software before SP3, but now it almost seems as if SolidWorks Corp is actually working to that schedule.

What do you think? Are you ready for another new version? Have you installed the old one yet? What is the stuff that you wish were in the software but again doesn’t make it year after year? It seems a bit ungrateful of me to complain about great new stuff, but let’s get the tires fixed, and drop in a faster engine before we repaint this thing again. What do you say?