http://solidworksheard.com SolidWorks tips and tech news podcast hosted by Digital Dimensions, Inc. Wed, 10 Sep 2008 20:23:45 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en [caption id="attachment_104" align="alignright" width="300" caption="Image courtesy of SolidWorks.com"][/caption] With SolidWorks 2009 just around the corner, many users are wondering about the true performance gains that have been touted .  Every year SolidWorks releases a new major release with 250 enhancements but what really makes users believe the release is worthy to upgrade to ... http://solidworksheard.com/archives/2008/09/10/performance-gains-for-solidworks-2009/ I know many of you have heard me talk about this online micro blogging platform before on the podcast but though I would take an opportunity to dive into some details of what is growing out of the conversation. The Service: This service was launched in March of 2006 and really ... http://solidworksheard.com/archives/2008/08/17/productive-community-growing-around-twitter/ On Saturday July 12 I was one if the guys standing in line for the much anticipated iPhone 3G. Being a gaget guy and all around tech geek I was even curious enough to drive down to the local AT&T store with my 2 year old only to find 70 ... http://solidworksheard.com/archives/2008/07/23/iphonemy-story/ Now that we are all beta testing SolidWorks 2009, I can't help but think about how much CAD applications have transformed over the past 15 years and what path the future will take. With the launch of cloud-based applications like Google Apps, Photoshop Express, and Windows Live Mesh, it is ... http://solidworksheard.com/archives/2008/06/30/future-of-cad-and-cloud-computing/ On Monday, June 11 both SolidWorks Corporation and Apple Corporation were working hard launching some new technologies to excite their customers.  Apple with the iPhone 3G and SolidWorks with SolidWorks 2009 Beta 1. SolidWorks 2009 Beta 1 was made available immediately after the webcast, as opposed to Apple who baited ... http://solidworksheard.com/archives/2008/06/13/solidworks-2009-beta-live/ Embedding SolidWorks into Microsoft Word or Powerpoint has always been a OLE (object linking and embedding) technology that is important to users that create documentation or presentation materials. With the introduction of Microsoft Office 2007, there were some major changes not only to the interface, but also to the way ... http://solidworksheard.com/archives/2008/05/05/embedding-edrawings-in-office-2007/ SolidWorks has included a few nice tools to assist in export existing data from one PDMWorks Workgroup vault and importing into another.  These tools are located in the install directory for PDMWorks Workgroup <c:\Program Files\PDMWorks Workgroup\Vault\>. pdmwexport.exe - When launched, this tool will prompt for login and then display all the ... http://solidworksheard.com/archives/2008/04/03/copy-pdmworks-workgroup-projects-to-another-vault/ Last week I was in L.A. for 3DVIA Composer training and I wanted to take a moment to outline how this tool can complement a company using SolidWorks for their product design. For those of you who have not heard of 3DVIA Composer it is a content creation tool that ... http://solidworksheard.com/archives/2008/02/26/composing-solidworks-content-with-3dvia/ The "Stump the Chump" breakout went better than I thought it would. We really didn't have a scripted plan and Ben Eadie did a great job explaining to the mob what the "Rules of Engagement" were. The rule was this, we are not here to prove we know it all ... http://solidworksheard.com/archives/2008/01/26/success-with-the-chumps/ Well as you may have heard I have voluntarily become one of the Chumps in the SolidWorks World breakout session in January of 2008. This is a new breakout session that Ben Eadie of SolidMentor has spearheaded that will be comprised of an open forum of users that can pitch ... http://solidworksheard.com/archives/2007/12/23/bring-it-stumpers/ SolidWorks 2008 introduced a new wizard-based tool for developing rules to automate the creation of your SolidWorks designs. There are a few of these wizards in 2008, one of which I know you have heard of, COSMOSXpress. These types of wizards give us a taste of what is ... http://solidworksheard.com/archives/2007/11/12/driveworksxpress-vs-design-tables/ I am asked frequently from various users about what my advise is about SolidWorks running under Windows Vista. I have been running Vista since Beta 1 was released and still have the Business version installed on a desktop at work which forces me to use it every day. ... http://solidworksheard.com/archives/2007/10/07/solidworks-on-vista/ Many of you may have seen screenshots of SolidWorks 2008 or may have heard talk about hardware requirements that will be necessary to support this new graphic capability. RealView was introduced in SolidWorks 2004 and has continued to be in the product over the past 4 releases, which was ... http://solidworksheard.com/archives/2007/09/03/realview-perspective/ SolidWorks Labs had a nice update and if you have never visited SolidWorks Labs site you are missing out! SolidWorks Labs is a site that is hosted by SolidWorks R & D and displays some of the projects that they are working on. Those of you that fall ... http://solidworksheard.com/archives/2007/08/12/solidworks-labs-adds-more-features/ The ability to use sketches to rip sheet metal parts may be one of the most important features, especially when importing solids. The rip feature used to only be able to rip linear edges on the part. However, as you can see in the example to the left, ... http://solidworksheard.com/archives/2007/07/28/using-sketches-to-rip-sheet-metal-parts/ I have talked about this tool before in the podcast but I thought I would take the opportunity to show the interface of this little data utility in order to bring a level of clairity to the table. This tool is located in the installation directory under Toolbox/data utilities. ... http://solidworksheard.com/archives/2007/07/13/changing-the-solidworks-toolbox-flag/ With SolidWorks being a muilt-window application, there are a few tricks you can do with multiple windows tiled using drag and drop. As you may already know, selecting features from one part and dragging and dropping them into another part to copy them is a feature that has been ... http://solidworksheard.com/archives/2007/06/30/auto-align-and-mate-hole-patterns/ For an old feature, vary sketch still gets a lot of praise from those that use it. It can be very useful when wanting to use a linear pattern but need to have some adjustment happen on some of the instances. The picture to the left shows what ... http://solidworksheard.com/archives/2007/06/21/automatically-vary-a-pattern/ This is a followup post to episode 92 when I discussed 3D sketches in SolidWorks. As I mentioned, many people don't realize that you can extrude or cut with a 3D sketch as long as it is closed and it has a vector direction to extrude along. As ... http://solidworksheard.com/archives/2007/06/15/extruding-a-3d-sketch/ Do you remember the old auto explode from the earlier versions of SolidWorks? It was rare when it worked but might be an asset with simple assemblies. Well, there is a great embeded command in eDrawings that can help you when you need to explode an eAssembly. The best part ... http://solidworksheard.com/archives/2007/06/06/auto-explode-in-edrawings/