Quality is the 'Killer Feature'

Come on - who agrees with Jol - please speak up !!

Yep - It must surely be time to CONSOLIDATE.

The product is truly great - full of awesome features

But I beg - please don't add any more features.

Please please please walk a mile with some serious real-life users and smooth their stoney way !!

Hi Jlm,
I can't really say that I miss Vellum 2.7, because I still use it, but not too often. There does come a time when you do have to move forward.
Larry

Looks like i am another dinosaur ...

From time to time i am still using Draftboard Pocket.

Finding Viacad/Shark on the internet was the result of
a small research on the internet under the title "how
did Vellum/Draftboard develop ?"

Roland

Hi Jlm,
Quote:
"Shark + 64 bits + Model to Sheet upgrade + Bug solving = The best design software !"


The one more item that I would add to your list is the Tool Sets from Vectorworks. I have Vectorworks, and really only use it for the parametric tools, shafts, gears, screws etc. and export as .sat.
Larry

I fully support Jol's Campaign for Quality.

Working in the enterprise software business I am aware of all the challanges associated with stable, reliable but also innovative products. Trying to provide leading edge technology always involves the painful but necessary task of Quality Assurance.

Nevertheless - there is a point in time when less is more! So please focus on finalizing a great software (and on getting rid of "old" annoying bugs)

I still appreciate working with Shark FX (V8) and would like to continue - but as already said: I'm looking for a stable, reliable major release and no longer betas...

Cheers
Wolfgang

For me it was allways the other way round. :)
I feel directed and restricted with the sketch->object->assembly approach of traditional software like ProE,SW,CATIA etc.
It may be better to have everything clean and parametric. But you are really slow with that.
With the feature tree you are perfectly right! That is something Shark can learn from SW. It unleashes the power of parametric modeling. And its usable and fast...

I agree with Jol. Stability, reliability are very important qualities that need to be addressed for Shark to move forward successfully. I don't know all of the issues, but large files have big stability issues. I can only hope that a 64 bit Mac version will improve stability.
I'm not sure that a History Tree is needed. But always having access to parametric features is necessary.
It seems that the UI has become a little dated in respect to the use of layers in 3D.
Layers are relative to 2D drawing (akin to paper sheets), and so are useful in that context, but not 3D.
In 3D objects should be treated separately, listing all features summarily, with the ability to refine and modify specific properties of each feature. Imagine clicking on an object and having a circle (or some shape) expand from that object that would in-circle the extents of the object to be modified, and then features descriptions (icon or text, or both) would be defined with callouts to each specific feature. In this way there would be more screen-estate to view parts close up. Is this just my coffee talking? So, I think there needs to be a more than just a refinement process. You can get an idea of what I am talking about from the free version of Autocad Inventor Fusion for Mac. Although it is not the best UI for a CAD software, it has a simple, yet powerful UI. I've just used it to check that a client could utilize surfacing work done with SharkFX and some other CAD App.

Here's a problem I'm battling with at the moment.

To see it best, set the Static Shade to Flat under View > Display Options or use the Surface Analysis tools if you have them.

Take the attached file and export it as a STEP or IGES file and when you import it back in, there is a large deterioration in the centre patch blend which is impossible to correct. This makes any kind of export pointless, if you need to retain quality. Even a SAT file doesn't look quite the same when imported back in

The problem seems to occur when analytics are converted to nurbs at export time or when solids are changed into surfaces etc.

The upshot is that you have to be extremely careful as to what you can export and have confidence that it will retain it's original form.


Martin.

What answer do you expect? They know it of course, but probably being told by the management to focus on new features or just don't know how to solve the issues. If it was easy, they would have fixed it.

But an answers would be wise from a PR point of view.