The Tuesday morning keynote ranged from the funny to the interesting. Some people have thought that SolidWorks ceo Jeff Ray knows nothing about his software; the myth was debunked by having him answer five questions from the certified SW professional exam. He got them all correct.
Movie director James Cameron was the star attraction of SWWX, and I was amazed by his technical knowledge. He could fling about FEA and CFM around with the best of us. Turns out he worked in a machine shop as a teenager, so he has first-hand knowledge of what CAD is used for -- to design stuff that needs to get made.
Listening to him made me wonder if a movie like Avatar could only have been made by someone like him, because he knows what is possible and has a staff that pushes itself to delivery otherwise technically impossible feats. Like the 3mm wide (total width) fiber optic cable that runs 36,000 feet long, connecting a planned undersea vehicle to the surface. Those 3mm includes the steel protective mesh and the insulation.
Later during the press conference, he admitted that there hasn't been a lot of technology transfer from what he and his team have developed and the commercial or even miltary world. There have been some talks and some interest, but that's as far as it has gotten so far.
In the evening, Luxology had some of us media at dinner across the road in DisneyLand. Their ceo described the history of his company and its emphasis on providing toolkits for rendering. They are best known for their mondo 401 rendering software, but that is just an example app based on their technology called Nexus. Both SolidWorks and Bentley use Nexus as their rendering engines.
I skipped the Aerosmith tribute band that SolidWorks had lined up back at the convention center. I hear it was dark ("couldn't find the food!") and noisey.
This morning at breakfast, I saw SolidWorks running on a Mac! Well, via Parallels. The SW user told me he prefers running SW on his Mac, and that he has been urging DSSW to do the port. He tells me that the only thing missing is hardware acceleration of the graphics, but that he does not miss it. For him, the most imporant feature is to be able to window the 3D model in SolidWorks, do a screen grab of the area, and then paste directly into email. That's what sold him.
Just a heads up on some great free applications, for sceenshotting. Check out both greenshot and screenpresso. I like screenpresso better, but I have had some issues with it on XP. Both have built in editors that have some great functionality.
I also ran into a very nice web site for tech support. See their video at ShowMeWhatsWrong.com. Again fully free and this one does up to 5 min videos.
Posted by: Matt Feider | Feb 03, 2010 at 01:33 PM