SolidWorks Wins Race to Name First Product "2009"

... and it's only January, 2008.

A mere 24 days into the new year, and SolidWorks knots our brains by talking about software named "2009."

Lots of photos and commentary on SolidWorks 2009 at Mike Puckett's Blog: Solidworks 2009 Sneak Peak. Some of the new features are:

- sliders show more or less parts of an assembly.
- geometry is dimensioned automatically as it is sketched.
- BOMs from 3D solids.
- automatic unfolding of solids into sheetmetal.
- reverse bird's eye view (heh: available for AutoCAD since the late 1980s, thanks to Artist Graphics).

Let the race begin for users of competitor products to mock, "Yah, well, OUR software did that 4 versions ago!"

Comments

[Evan Yares]

Sliders: This is just a small part of the SpeedPak technology. From what I can tell, SolidWorks is probably using GPU-based shaders to implement this. It's very fast. I think it's quite different from what competitors have done.

Reverse birds-eye: It's a magnifier -- which I suppose is the opposite of a birds-eye view. In any case, this too seems to be implemented with shaders. Artist Graphics' 1980s display-list based version was pretty primitive by comparison.

As for how long ago competitive products did various things: It probably doesn't matter all that much to SolidWorks users.