Could it be? Is it possible that the day has finally come when Gabi Jack has nothing else to blog about? Is that why this blog has been so, well, empty ever since she came back from SolidWorks World? Has Gabi finally come to her senses and decided to renounce absolutely everything related to 3D modeling, design and engineering, and instead put her highly rated athletic skills and daring personalit...

If you’ve seen this blog kind of empty lately is because I’ve spent the last few days “putting my house in order” after the trip to SolidWorks World. I had my laptop with me the whole time, but a lot of email went unanswered just the same, so I came back to dealing with that, plus taking care of a few local appointments I had set up before leaving, hunting for a new babysitter for my boys,...

Bruce Holway, Manager of Product Definition for DS SolidWorks showed up to let us know what the top ten enhancements for 2010 will be, as voted for by the community through Brainstorm.  And these are the ten that made the list this year: 1. Increase program stability 2. Clear memory when a file is closed 3. SolidWorks backwards compatibility 4. Rename configurations that are in use. 5. Faster r...

Today was the final day of SolidWorks World 2009. I guess the fun can’t last forever! I had a wonderful time, met a lot of interesting people, saw amazing technologies that I hadn’t even dreamt of, and learned a lot. I know I will never forget it and I’m really grateful to all the wonderful friends from SolidWorks for allowing me to be here in the first place. The day started early as usual,...

Today’s general session was even better than yesterday’s.  It started with Fielder Hiss, Director of Product Management for DS SolidWorks, who introduced Tom Salomone, Worldwide Segment Manager of Mechanical Design Automation for Hewlett Packard, and expressed their gratitude to HP for being one their biggest platinum sponsors for this event. Right after that, Jeremy Luchini, Certification ...

I attended three technical sessions today. The first one was Sheet Metal. Why I do it like this and like that? , with Wayne Tiffany.  I’m glad I arrived early because the place was completely full. I think this session is one of the most popular ones, and with good reason. Wayne explained to us the different reasons why sometimes we need to take a certain approach when modeling sheet metal pa...

I had been told by quite a few people that my head would be spinning by the end of the day one at SolidWorks World. Well, I can’t say it’s really spinning, but I actually feel fired up and full of energy after this crazy cool day I’ve had today. This is a picture I took of the breakfast area this morning. See all this people? This is only a small fraction of all the people present here at S...

Of course, I’ve been taking a few pictures, although perhaps not as many as I would’ve liked. Here are a few of them for you. This is pretty much where my day started, at the registration table, which turned out to be a mistake, because I was actually supposed to go to the press room for registration, so it took a little while just to sort things out and get my press badge and CSWP flag attach...

So, after a short break I headed over to the meeting room Toucan 1 for the Weldments focus group meeting, hosted by Jay Patterson, SolidWorks Product Specialist for DS SolidWorks. Once again, this was an extremely small group, but luckily graced with the presence of Randy Ooms, from Granco Clark, who really knows what he’s talking about when it comes to SolidWorks and Weldments. Randy is also on...

I was lucky enough to get myself into a couple of focus group meetings here at SolidWorks World. These are meetings that DS SolidWorks organizes with the intention of getting feedback from users of their product, what is working, what is not, and what could be improved. This morning I attended one of these focus group meetings about PhotoWorks, PV360 and Animator.  There wasn’t much talk about...

Well, I’m finally here at the Dolphin hotel in Orlando, waiting with great excitement for SolidWorks World to begin very early tomorrow. Despite a failure in one of the engines of the plane I was travelling in during the first part of my trip, and an almost lost connection in Denver (boy, the last time I ran like that I was chasing a soccer ball not a plane), I was very lucky to make it on t...

This is an update on the TwitterDoodle experiment that turned out to be a real disaster.  I want to apologize to all the readers for my mistake. When I added TwitterDoodle to the blog, my intention was simply to give the readers more tools for finding information about SolidWorks World, since many people on Twitter will be constantly posting updates, tips learned, and links to interesting article...

Thanks to the magic of TwitterDoodle plug-in for Word Press, I now have a search feed for posts on Twitter that are related to SolidWorks World 2009. The plug-in searches for all Twitter posts that contain the keywords SWW09, SWW2009 and SolidWorks World and then displays the results as a new post in this blog. It updates often throughout the day, so you can follow everything is being said on Twit...

It is with great sadness that I pass this news over to you. I’ve just read Rob Rodriguez announcing the 36th PhotoWorks Rendering contest, which will also be the final one.  I feel a bit bummed out, I can’t deny it.  I mean, the rendering contest is a really neat idea and I wish it could continue to be, somehow, that someone could take over and host it for Rob, I don’t know… I even consi...