User Interface thoughts

[Rocketmagnet]

Hi chaps,

OK, so I finally managed to get Wildcad running, and it looks lovely.
A very nice job so far. I like the fact that the 3D part of the
window is so big, with the feature tree overlaying it. There were a
few bugs, which I'll not mention yet. What I wanted to talk about was
my thoughts on the user interface.

I do a *lot* of CAD CAM and EDA at work (www.shadowrobot.com), and
I've used quite a number of CAD packages, including Pro/Desktop,
Solidworks, VX, OneCNC, gschem, pcb, Eagle, and I've seen demos of
lots of others.

Possibly the nicest interface I've seen on a CAD package is that of
Pro/Desktop. Hardly anyone's heard of it, but it's powerful enough to
handle all the complexity of the humanoid robot hand we produce.
Although it doesn't have as many powerful features as Solidworks and
Pro/Engineer, the interface is better thought out, and there are some
interface features I'd hate to lose.

In particular, there's no real boundary between sketches, solids and
assemblies, as there is in other packages. In some packages, you can
either do File->New Part, or File->New Assembly. In Pro/D, there's
just New. You can sketch, create a solid from that, create sketches on
the surface of the solid, add other parts to make an assembly, mate
those parts to the solid, project edges of that part onto other
sketches to create new lines, create sketches on the faces of the
assembled-in part, etc. All without feeling like you're in a different
'mode'.

Here's a screenshot showing a sketch being used to create a solid in
the middle of an assembly:
http://www.liquidpcb.org/ProDesktop_01.png

And a couple more shots showing the useful rendering modes which I've
never seen in other CAD packages:
Glass rendering mode (it would be almost impossible to do my job
without this):
http://www.liquidpcb.org/ProDesktop_02.png

Faint wireframe (lets you really see the sketch lines, even when
they're in the middle of a large assembly):
http://www.liquidpcb.org/ProDesktop_03.png

The other great thing is that the shortcut keys are so useful that you
hardly need any icons. In fact, if you look at those screenshots, you
can see that I work with all the icons hidden to maximise the working
area. Almost everything can be done with the keys, and a little bit
of menus. This makes working extremely fast.

Anyway, thanks for listening.

Hugo