SolidWorks World 2014: Day 4 – Wednesday General Session – Product Definition

General Session

The General Session for Wednesday was as entertaining as ever.  Most the details from Wednesday General Session have already been well covered by other blogs and online outlets.  I’m going to focus on Bruce Holway’s presentation instead.  It is important to me because he’s describing the his group (Product Definition of which I am apart) and past years SolidWorks World Top Ten enhancements list.  He states that the vast majority of past year’s Top Ten have been implemented.  He covers many of recent examples.

  • Default to Concentric Mate when two selected faces are cylindrical
  • Default to Parallel Mate when two selected faces have other geometry that prevent coincident mating
  • Lock Option for Concentric Mates so that additional mates are not required to stop rotation of a cylindrical part
  • Slot Mate
  • Center of Mass reference geometry
  • Fix Edge Bleed Thru display, where thin walled features sometimes displayed fragments of obscured features
  • Don’t Delete Child Features, Dangle them Instead when deleting a parent feature
  • eDrawings for Android

Also mentioned is the fact that we visit hundreds of customers each year at their sites to understand how they are using SolidWorks.  This is extremely valuable in determining how we plan to improve our product offerings by giving us first hand experiences from our customers.

This year’s SolidWorks World Top Ten list:

  1. Auto-hide components
  2. Draw a line segment starting from the mid-point
  3. Equal spacing option for linear patterns
  4. Ability to rename a part or sub-assembly in the feature tree
  5. Unlimited undo/redo
  6. Pressing the ESC key should immediately stop the current calculation and return control to the user
  7. Fillets and chamfers should be managed by the same feature
  8. Ability to flip angle dimensions after they have been placed
  9. Hole callout should include all instances on the same face
  10. New Purge command

Author: fcsuper

As a drafter, mechanical designer and CAD engineer, I've been in the mechanical design field since 1991. For the first 8 years of my career, I was an AutoCAD professional. I utilized AutoLISP and many other AutoCAD customization features to streamline drafting activities for 6+ drafters and designers. I authored several custom functions, one of which was published in the March 1997 issue of Cadalyst Magazine. Since 1998, I've been used SolidWorks non-stop. I've worked to utilize the SolidWorks' user environment to simplify drafting and design activities for 20+ engineers. I've created this website to provide current information about SolidWorks from a variety of contributors. More recently, I am now employed by Dassault Systemes as SOLIDWORKS Sr. Product Definition Manager to improve drawing, annotation and MBD related areas.

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