July, 2000
Constant Progress Apparent at SMUG meeting
by Jim Hole
After years of meetings at Knoll, the Southwestern Michigan Pro/E Users Group is seeing the town. Arena Station, Steelcase's downtown meeting space, provided a great place for the group to preview PTC's new offerings. The always engaging and entertaining Dan Paulucci welcomed the group and gave a brief overview of Steelcase's use of Pro/ENGINEER and how the Champion structure works.
MECHANICA enhancements
Jeff Mentley of PTC gave an overview of all the improvements to Pro/MECHANICA 2000i2. The big story here, as with all 2000i2 modules, is integration and communication. The software is beginning to run a lot more smoothly between the modules and in linked sessions.
This "melding" of modules provides many benefits — notably, the concurrent use of some of the Behavioral, Mechanism and Mechanica functions. As a non-user, I can only give a generic overview, but the hour-long presentation had the handful of Mechanica users quite interested.
Pro/E enhancements
Eric Boersma of PTC gave an overview of all the improvements to Pro/E 2000i2, including the changes to Sketcher. The first big change is the look — gone are all the menus, replaced with icons. Once you get past the new look, you'll notice new functionality. For instance, trimming and arcs are both streamlined, and you can now use a spreadsheet such as Excel as your table editor. Many more incremental changes are hidden in the new release; together, they should add up to another big step forward.
Mechanism design
After a short break, Jon Hadley, senior mechanical designer and regular SMUG presenter, wowed us with his postponed Mechanism Design demonstration. This time the demo computer was capable, and the presentation of how Jon uses the system to design and animate his chair controls was definitely worthy of the wait.
I could not help drawing a comparison between navigating the ever-changing downtown landscape en route to Arena Station, and navigating the ever-changing Pro/ENGINEER menu structures and offerings. Both bring future ease of use for the price of temporary disorientation.
B.O.B.
After the software previews, a subset of the SMUG decided to further ponder these advancements. We decided on the cultural and theological think tank conveniently located across the street known only by the mysterious palindrome B.O.B. We provided our bodies sustenance and our minds with lubrication. We studied and performed many experiments in geometry, momentum, and inertia. We believe we postulated some eternal theorems and I am proud of the efforts put forth by my fellow SMUG members. …………Ok, ok, we drank beer, ate nachos, played pool and decided: Pro/E - good , orange traffic cones - bad, night life - still the best .
Next meeting
The next SMUG meeting is scheduled for 1-4 p.m. Nov. 1 at the Haworth Inn & Conference Center in Holland. Be sure to check the SMUG website and subscribe to the email exploder for updates or changes.