You can preview the featured videos from a link on our website: http://www.capinc.com/SolidWorks2010, or signup for one of our “What’s New” open house events in October.

While I’m typically the type of person who fears change, our Engineering Manager, Jason, has always said that new SW releases should be like Christmas Morning for Application Engineers.  And these last two years he’s been right.

Unlike 2008, where SW made major changes to the user interface (not that it didn’t need it), SW 2009 and 2010 have been the same SW you’re used to, just with deeper features and pleasant surprises under the wrapping.  Even though they put thousands of man-hours rewriting the SW code, the developers aren’t making us re-learn the software that most of us make our living from, and I appreciate that.  The new power is there, if you want to use it, but you’re not pushed to (in most cases).

For example, mouse gestures.  The same sort of cool flicks and drags you see on those Ipod commercials can now be used to select commands in SW.  If you like it, that’s fine, customize which buttons go in which directions, in sketches, parts, assemblies, drawings- you can really go to town.  If not- turn off one check box and you’ll never see them again.

Simple.  Useful.  Optional.  Just like new features should be.

There are plenty of other tools they’ve added, like SustainabilityXpress to give insight on the total lifecycle cost of your part, from manufacture to disposal.  Or assembly visualizations to sort your parts from lightest to heaviest, cheapest to most expensive, even Aluminium to Zinc!

But these are just some of the tools we’ll be exploring at our October sessions, among others to make you feel like the new release of SolidWorks is the new train set you’ve always wanted under the tree, and not just another sweater.

Hope to see you  in October!

-Shuvom