While I am sitting here in my office watching a PhotoView 360 animation render through 1351 frames, I think it would be a good time to start exploring the new release of SolidWorks 2012. This 20th release of SolidWorks went Pre-Release 1 on September 6th.
This year I was invited to the SolidWorks Blogger/Press Event at SolidWorks Headquarters in Concord, and was able to get a good look at the new features of SolidWorks 2012 with a 4 hour briefing by Jeremy Regenerus. The event was very informative and I came home to Phoenix with a much different view of SolidWorks 2012 then what I had when I arrived in Concord.
Like I do every year during Beta, I downloaded the What’s New In SolidWorks 2012 pdf and gave it a good cover to cover read. My initial impression of SolidWorks 2012 was a bit ho-hum, not much there. There really isn’t a big wow feature this year, that is a must have for my workflow.
That impression changed after attending Jeremy’s briefing in Concord. While I still believe there is not a big new WOW set of features, SolidWorks 2012 delivers a lot of improvements to existing functionality. This release continues on the themes of the last few releases in polishing the UI and many of the commands we use every day. A lot of thought has gone into many of the features to make them easier to use, less mouse miles and adding some more spit and polish to the functionality to make it work better and easier.
What are my favorite new features? Feature Freeze, the new Form Tool Wizard, Large Design Review, the new Equation Dialog and many of the UI improvements come to mind. For those users that are squarely in the 90% of what a typical SolidWorks user uses the program for, this release offers a lot.
Over the next few weeks, I am going to go through the What’s New pdf and explore some of my favorite new SolidWorks functionality and consider its possibilities to improving my workflow.
Disclosure: SolidWorks covered my airfare, hotel and Monday night dinner for my trip to the SolidWorks Blogger/Press Event.
One new feature I forgot to add to my list of favorites are Magnetic Lines for Drawing Balloons. That will save all kinds of time the drawing balloons lined up and looking good.
SolidWorks Costing functionality is a well-thought out feature that would go a long way in designers developing cost-effective designs. This is bound to generate interest in the Design community trying to find ways and means to reduce costs and stay competitive.
Maybe DS will now be able to generate a price list for Solidworks and Catia products.
No wonder this has taken so long. It is very difficult to do pricing for geometry that is unreliable.
Hi Anna, I’m glad you highlighted the UI improvements and the value in some of the smaller additions that a lot of people take for granted. That’s something that’s a bit intangible to sell and doesn’t have the wow factor of newer features and functionality, but it certainly adds tremendous value to end users. A lot of people are hard set in their own methods, and that’s fine, but for those of us that are willing to keep an open mind on how we interact with our software, these improvements, albeit often redundant, are a major time saver.