Unlike most services that were created to solve a specific problem/problems, Google Wave seems to be searching for a problem to solve.  In the past few months I have been reading a multitude of sources to see how others have found problems to solve with Google Wave.  This year at SolidWorks World, I have been taking notes with my friends and colleagues in order to ensure that the detail accuracy is high.  Collaborative notes seems to be one of the many use cases that I think everyone could benefit from.

One of the major problems early on with a public-facing wave was the lack of control a wave creator had for access to the participants.  Now that Google has rolled out the abiltiy to control Read/Write acess, now public waves can be controlled and the mess of too many editors can be avoided.

For those of you on Google Wave and want to get some of the notes you can go to the search and type in "with:public + tag:sww10" and see the waves I have started that are public.  Finding the waves, as you can see, are not friendly but we are all engineers and so are the designers of Wave.  Here are the short links for the waves I have started:

- SolidWorks World 2010 - What Sheet Metal Manufacturers Wish You Knew:

- SolidWorks World 2010 - 10 Administration Essentials for all SolidWorks Users:

- SWW10: SolidWorks 2011 Sneak Peak: (will be only on the notes for 2011 on Wednesday)

- SolidWorks World 2010 - SolidWorks Graphics Performance Analysis & Tuning:

There will be about 5 or 6 of us taking notes and you will all be able to see the notes come together live or come back after and see the results of our madness! ~Lou

When SolidWorks 2010 was in Beta, the release notes stated under "Technical Alerts" that support for parallel installations of service packs within a major release would be discontinued beginning with SolidWorks 2010 (ie. 2010 SP0 & SP1 in parallel on the same system).  This decision was made in order to "reduce service pack size and download time" according to Release Notes and I am sure I was not alone when I thought this sounded like another potential promise that was going to be hard to deliver on.  A similar statement was made back when SolidWorks switched from InstallShield to Windows Installer and touted the capability to "Rollback" a service pack.

2010 SP1 came out in early December and upon going through the usual screens in the SolidWorks Installation Manager (SWIM), the service pack payload showed a respectable 230MB for patching SolidWorks 2010 Premium with all the Simulation packages!  This was approximately 1/5th the size of the equivalent SP1 patch for SolidWorks 2009 which was nearly 2GB.  A few days ago, SolidWorks pushed out SP2 for 2010 and the service pack "diet" continued yielding only 200MB!

Reducing the download size of these service packs has made patching the install take less time and something that I can actually do during work hours again.  When the patches were more than 1GB, I would begin the download at the end of the day to spare the bandwidth and hope that nothing happened when I returned in the morning.  This made the entire patch process more painful and something I knew would take a chunk of time to complete.  Out of all the hundreds of enhancements SolidWorks 2010 has brought, this is the one I know I will continue to enjoy for the remainder of this release!  ~Lou

After a one year hiatus, the Stump the Chumps breakout session is back in the agenda for SolidWorks World 2010.  For those of you that did not have the pleasure to attend the debut session back in 2008, this session is about answering the tough questions.  We all run across challenges when using SolidWorks and this is your chance to ask the best of the best to give you the answer, or in many cases "answers".

This year's panel has expanded to include a few of SolidWorks' own as well as the blogger/super users of the previous session two years ago and a few new faces.  Jeff Mirisola, an original Chump, is the mastermind behind bringing the session out of retirement and has details on his blog about all the Chumps, including yours truly, on the 2010 panel.

The session layout will also change a bit by including questions from not only the audience but also from those of you willing to submit your tough questions and/or vote on submitted ones.  We have put together a site where you can submit these questions and vote on others to get them into the session, even if you can't attend.  If you could visit the question submission site and add or vote for the questions you would like to get answers for, we would all appreciate it.  This is a community session and the Chumps want to help solve as many problems as we can.

Many of us will becovering the event live and possibly including ways for you to participate online while the session is going on.  The official session details are here on the SolidWorks World site.  This session was a blast last time and we were not stumped so I ask you all to BRING IT!  ~Lou

As the hype dies down around Google Wave and the tinkerers all shake their heads and walk away underwhelmed, the work begins.  From the very beginning Google Wave proposed a platform that would allow us to consolidate our communication and collaboration needs into one platform.  However, many missed the fact that this platform is in Preview and is just a glimpse of what could be.  Many would argue that Google Wave, as it works today, is not worth anything and does nothing but create yet another place that you need to check for "Unread" somethings.  I agree it is not ready for the public and has some real missing features and security issues, however developers are making up for many of the lack of features with all types of gadgets.

If you are on Google Wave, a great public resource for how Google Wave works today is at The Complete Guide to Google Wave by Gina Trapani (Founder of LifeHacker).  Another great resource is in this public Wave: Google Wave Extenstion List where you can find some of the current development to extend Google Wave beyond what is launched in the Preview.

For those of us in the CAD Industry, we have been trying to find how we can all use this technology to bring collaboration to product development.  I wanted to use the resources that are availble now to take a first step in bringing 3D into Google Wave.  Since 3dvia is already web-based and has conduits to upload many 3D file formats into their community, I started there.  I was able to upload a model from SolidWorks and embed it into Google Wave for others to see and manipulate.  How to Embed 3dvia into Google Wave:

1. Go to 3dvia.com and find a model (or upload one from your CAD tool of choice)

2. Click on the model and select the "Embed" tab on the right of the site.  This will allow you to copy the embed code.

3. Start a new blip (New edit in a wave)

4. Click on the "Add Gadget by URL" button

5. Type in the HTML gadget url: http://wave-ide.appspot.com/html.xml - This will load a gadget window in Google Wave.  In the upper left click "Edit" and you can paste in the embed code from 3dvia.com.

6. Once pasted, click "View" in the upper left of the gadget window and you will see the image of your model with the "Play 3D" on it. Click to start the viewer.

In order to get this to work you will need to have 3dvia Player installed which is supported in both IE (Windows) and Firefox (Mac & Windows).  There is no support for Chome, which is my browser of choice, especially with Wave but Firefox works well.  The viewer, as far as I can tell, is not collaborative so everyone sees their own instance of it but this is much better than just uploading a file attachment.

I hope to see more true collaborative 3D tools emerge for Google Wave since the framework lends itself nicely to product development and would complement any 3D CAD tool out there.  ~Lou