SolidWorks 2008 vs. SolidWorks 2009

There most certainly is a difference and frankly, I do not like it one bit.

The spontaneous, intuitive use of the software that has developed over the last 14 years has suffered severely. There are three users at my job, all very experienced and they all have expressed the opinion that Solidworks must learn to leave well enough alone.

It's the software equivalent of changing the pedals on you car, swapping the gas for the brake pedal.

Today I was angry as Hell trying to find the feature in the tree after right clicking the part. Could not find the command!

They have doubled and tripled up on icon functions which were once shortcuts to a single command. Now you have ten or twelve lines of commands to read through.

The sales people at Solidworks have forced software developers to cram more functionality to help the company's efforts to stay ahead of SolidEdge and WILDFIRE.

In so doing they have buried the functions that people use. By so doing, they have actually interfered with the creative process and given away the advantage they had over Pro E back in 1995 when Solidworks first came out.

They need to relearn the KISS principle and make it easier for people to customize commands so familiar functions are where they used to be.

Those who are most affected by this state of affairs are the seasoned users who have learned how to drive the software intuitively. Newcomers, those with nothing to "unlearn" may not find this situation as intolerable as do those of us who have been with Solidworks from the beginning.

I have most every release of SWks since day one at home and currently use 2009 at the office. When I get home, the version I use is 2001!

L.J.

It's gone downhill (uphill if you look at the price tag though) since Dassault bought them. They already had Catia and after the purchase Catia V5 came out with a very familiar looking interface.

It certainly has gone downhill - I have had quite a few issues with it. One assembly, which worked perfectly in SW 2008 gave problems in SW 2009 Sp1.0. If one tried to drag a component, nothing would happen for about 10 seconds, then it would move. Apparently it was a particular combination of mates (symmetry and distance, if I remember correctly) which caused this. This has been sorted out in Service Pack 2.0

However...... I found another mating problem the other day where the assembly stayed together and functioned corrected only if components were inserted into the assembly in a certain order. Anxiously awaiting Service Pack 3.0

Brgds

"They already had Catia and after the purchase Catia V5 came out with a very familiar looking interface."

The reason for that is simple.

The head of software development at Solidworks became the head of software development at Dassault after SD acquired Solidworks.

The irony of all this is that he was also the head of software development at Parametric Technologies, the company that first created the parametric 3D solid modeling paradigm with Pro Engineer.

PTC has come full circle. They redesigned the user interface when they developed WildFire and guess who THAT looks like?

It occured to me after I wrote my first response here, that Microsoft has provisions in XT to tailor the OS to support older software programs. For example: you can tell the OS to behave like Windows 2K when running a certain program. Likewise, Word Perfect has an option that allows you to load virtually any of it's older menus.

This doesn't cripple the newer functions; it simply restores a familiar environment to the screen.

The technology is available by which users can adjust their menus to that which is familiar. That Solidworks has failed to offer a similar solution is unfortunate and will cost them dearly.

One firm I know with 15 seats of Solidworks has started buying Alibre for its staff, not simply because of the much lower cost but because of the ease of use!

Back in 1995, Solidworks was the only alternative to Pro E. That is no longer the case.

L.J.

So use what works for you! DOH!