Next time you have some spare time sit down and think about CAD in general. Where do you think it’s going? What will be the next big thing? How many ‘new’ ways to we need to draw lines, circles & arcs?
I think that feature sets will continue to get larger and larger because this is what sells. This is what drives companies to switch from one program to another. But I wonder sometimes how much more stuff we need.
Being of a sheet metal mind set; I would like to see more emphasis place on this feature set. Square to round, cones and other transition wizards that resulted in ‘real’ flat patterns would really be nice. Also more latitude in what can be unfolded would be great. Just yesterday a customer sent me a ProE file that SolidWorks couldn’t unfold but ProE could. The part had fillets that were partially in the ‘bend areas’. We see this situation often and can’t understand why one CAD program can unfold it but SolidWorks can’t. But in fairness, I’m sure that the reverse is true also.
When I think about the user interface I realize that we have a hint of what’s to come by just looking at SW 2008. We will see more and more of this ‘heads up’ type interface in the coming years. Speaking of that, why isn’t the measure tool on the left click pop-up menu? That just seems natural to me.
Picture if you can the current interface evolving even more over the next few releases…now combine that with the voice command interface and maybe even the mouse gestures I mentioned in the last blog. Now we’re getting somewhere! Now imagine, if you can, a pair of glasses that you put on when you sit down to your computer that had eye tracking like the military uses. Instead of scroll bars you would just move your eyes from side to side and up and down. Need to rotate the part? Verbally say rotate and move your eyes in the direction of rotation. Far fetched? Not really the technology is already available.
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