Briefings: May 2006

By DE Editors

Industry News, Reports, and Items of Interest 

DE—Desktop Engineering—subscribers and website readers picked Mathcad 13 from Mathsoft Engineering & Education, Inc. as the 2005 Readers’ Choice Product of the Year. On March 24 of this year, DE Publisher Brian Vaillancourt, Associate Publisher Steve Kern, and I dropped in on Mathsoft to present the award plaque to Mathcad Product Manager Bonnie Rind and her team. Bernie Buelow, Mathsoft’s director of corporate communications, coordinated our visit. This is the kind of event that makes the everyday headaches of my job well worth it.

The Mathcad 13 product announcement first appeared in the November 2005 issue of DE. At that time, subscribers and website readers picked it to be that month’s Product of the Month. A review of Mathcad 13 later appeared in the December 2005 DE.

‹ ‹ DE Editor Anthony J. Lockwood, portly chap in suit, presenting the official DE 2005 Readers’ Choice Product of the Year Award to Mathcad 13 Product Manager Bonnie Rind.

As winter waned, DE subscribers and Web readers affirmed their choice yet again by picking Mathcad 13 as their 2005 Product of the Year out of a field of 11 other innovations.

Over the years, Mathcad has earned an outstanding reputation as a robust, reliable, and easy-to-use engineering calculation tool. In his December 2005 review, Barry Simon described Mathcad 13 as “a superb tool for doing and documenting mathematical calculations of interest to scientists, engineers, and other technical professionals.”

› › Mathcad Product Manager Bonnie Rind (wearing the white blouse behind poster) and the Mathcad 13 development team.

What I enjoyed most about my trip to Mathsoft was the pride exuded by the Mathcad development team. They and all employees of Mathsoft—no matter what their day-to-day role—are entitled to be proud of themselves.  Their hard work, dedication, and teamwork enabled their organization to succeed.

Finally, on behalf of DE, our subscribers, and our Web readers, I congratulate all of our 2005 Readers’ Choice Product of the Month winners for a job well done. Here are all the monthly winners:

Electronics Workbench for Multisim 8, CD-adapco for STAR-CD v3.24, Invention Machine for Goldfire Innovator 2.0, Solidscape for T6x BENCHTOP printer series, Blue Ridge Numerics for CFdesign Implementation Services Group, TekSoft for CAMWorks 2005, SolidWorks for SolidWorks 2006, PDE Solutions for FlexPDE 5, COMSOL for COMSOL Multiphysics 3.2, Maplesoft for Advanced Engineering Mathematics with Maple, and Noran Engineering, and MatWeb for Material Property Library for NEiWorks. —Lockwood

Mathsoft Engineering & Education
Cambridge, MA

Bob Mayer, IMSI‘s executive VP of Precision Design Products, stopped by the DE offices the other day to show off the newest version of TurboCAD Professional, v12.

Over the years, TurboCAD has taken a bum rap because it does not cost a king’s ransom and because it’s not intended to be an assembly modeler. Well, for one, TurboCAD is not in the market to compete with high-end assembly modelers. For two, its pricing structure means that TurboCAD is worthy of your serious consideration if your needs constitute less complex part designs or if you’re toying with getting into 3D design.

Current users of TurboCAD will find v12’s revised Part Tree and the availability of a new bending feature pluses. The overhaul of TurboCAD’s Part Tree means that v12’s modeling and editing are now fully parametric. Further, the Part Tree also provides a fuller view of a part’s history than earlier versions did.

TurboCAD Professional v12 comes with LightWork Design’s LightWorks 7.5 rendering with LightWorks Archive support. Its ACIS solid modeling engine from Spatial has been updated to version 15. Some enhancements include context-sensitive tools,  new horizontal and vertical constraints, improved parallel planes, and the ability to apply material properties to individual facets of an object.

IMSI’s new Mechanical Pack option has the functionality that enhances the application’s MCAD capabilities. The Mechanical Pack provides new bending, facet offset, and hole tools. The bending tool is of particular note since such functionality is not generally found in lower-cost applications. In the demo, bending was simple to do and fast.

TurboCAD supports the Open Drawing Alliance library files, providing access to more than 30 industry-standard file formats, such as DWG, DXF, IGES, STEP, and STL. It also offers PDF export capabilities.

TurboCAD Professional v12 costs $895, including a developer kit. You can register for a free 15-day download on the IMSI website. The Mechanical Pack is $69.95. —Lockwood

IMSI
Novato, CA

LightWork Design
Sheffield, UK

Spatial Corp.
Westminster, CO