I flew into New Orleans late yesterday morning. We have 6 guys from our local user group attending this year. I sat in on the first part of the CAD Manager's Boot Camp, but ended up bailing on that and going to the welcome reception in the partner pavillion. (I was starving and I knew that they had food in there.
)
I also wanted to see the unveiling of the
SolidWorks Roadster. I think I may have gotten in some of the press pics, as I was standing behind them when they were taking the group shots.
I have
posted a few pictures I took last night in the partner pavilion. These were just some of the products that caught my attention.
I will try to get some more up later.
The Superbowl party was really cool. There was lots of good food and drink, and I got to meet a lot of people from the forums here and the SolidWorks community, including Anna Wood, Rob Rodriguez, Jeff Mirisola, Ben Eadie, Devon Sowell, Matt Lombard, Lenny Kikstra, and a whole host of others. It was great to finally be able to put faces to names. And I'm with
Matt...I don't know where all those bottles on the table came from!
The main speaker today for the first general session was Col. Lewis F. Setliff III from the Army Corp of Engineers and was in charge during the restoration efforts here after the hurricanes. It was pretty interesting to see everything that got done from that point of view.
There was also MIT student Anna Jaffe from the
Vehicle Design Summit from MIT that gave a short presentation on who they are and what they are doing. It seems very interesting what they are doing and they are offering an X prize for innovation in automotive and environmental engineering.
I am really looking forward to tomorrow's General Session, as the keynote speaker is the Woz!
The sneak peak of 2008 they showed this morning has got me pretty excited. I can't wait for the big show on Wednesday!
The graphics look much improved, but I wonder what the hardware requirements are...it looked pretty resource intensive. But they have made it much easier to add textures by drag and drop and make things look more real in the modelling environment. When they brought the demo part up, it looked like we were seeing something rendered in PhotoWorks! And there is the ability to easily add background scenes by dragging and dropping from a PhotoWorks-esque pallette.
They showed some new assembly filtering technology that I am really excited to see, I know that it will be really useful in my work. It seems to build on and expand on the Isolate function added in SW2007. You can also do a window select, and then "extrude" a selection box out to encompass geometry that you want to focus on and easily edit it in the assembly context. It is also a lot easier to add/remove items from the isolation without seeming to disrupt the workflow as much.
They also showed off a new feature to easily change geometry by pushing/pulling (looks similar to IV's 3D grips) Looks more useful to me and maybe more friendly than IV's interface, but I haven't really used IV enough lately to have an idea. It seems like a good idea, but I don't know how much I will really use it.
I was really impressed by
SolidWorks Labs, specifically ZoomIn and COSMOSXpress Now. I can't wait to get a chance to play with them when I get back home.
One product I haven't gotten a pic of yet is the
Moo Bella ice cream machine. It makes custom-made ice cream for you on demand. I have to try it today!
Anyway, I guess that's all for now... I will try to post another update later today or tomorrow.
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