I've been on a tour of Southern California. Sitting in a hotel in Valencia on our way to Bakersfield. When I promised I'd see the people at ProSoft Technologies, I didn't realize how far it was from LA. There's snow in the mountains, but we're hoping to get through in an hour or so.
Some may wonder why I went to the SolidWorks user conference. After all, they make a mechanical design application program. Well, there were several cool tidbits. First, there was a presentation by Scott Fraser, Department Chair of Electrical Technology at Long Beach Community College and one of his students. Seems they enter one of the robot challenges. Needed some parts from the machine shop. Pulled out a student edition of SolidWorks and learned to design it. Now the electrical technology students not only learn how to program PLCs, but they also learn how to design in SolidWorks. The program has a 96% hit rate of getting jobs for graduates.
There was much talk of user interface during the conference that becomes directly applicable to HMI. Developers at SolidWorks are carefully studying developments in video/computer games, for example, for ideas on how to make software more usable <hint>.
CEO Jeff Ray quoted Throreau, "Men are becoming tools of their tools" to cite a direction of usability where users can be controllers of their tools--so that they can do design better and more quickly. It was pointed out in one session that many customers have assemblies of 100,000 parts to almost 1,000,000 parts. Think of the data management problem! That gets into the Automation World arena where we're looking at product lifecycle management, how to make the products and the like.
So lots of ideas from the mechanical CAD people.
12:27:42 PM 
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