CAD:

Rendering a solid or rendering surfaces in a separate window in BobCADCAM is unacceptable. One should be able to work with shaded surfaces and solids in real time like one is able to do in *every other* piece of software that I'm aware of. Having to do a render preview is a waste of time and does not facilitate an enjoyable experience for the user.

The concept of creating user defined planes and being able to save / recall them is absent in BobCADCAM. Even the standard planes don't exist in BobCADCAM... XY, XZ, YZ. When a user is modeling constantly having to move the UCS with no way to recall a user or standard plane this wastes massive amounts of time. Allowing for user defined planes along with having standard planes and having an easy way to switch between them is what all CADCAM software that I'm aware of does. Why anyone would want to model in BobCADCAM for 3D without standard and user defined planes is beyond me.

The BobCADCAM UI needs a permanently dockable tabbed tree / explorer that shows CAD and CAM operations. This allows for easy editing of a model. Both drag and drop reordering of operations and right clicking to edit CAD or CAM operations needs to be supported in this tabbed tree /explorer

Having what amounts to two separate windows that are not permanently docked (the CAM window should be able to be permanently docked inside the CAD Window) is a major pain in the ass because you constantly have to keep moving the focus between separate Windows. It's especially annoying / a major time waster, when your using a notebook or computer that does not have a very large screen. One finds themselves in a continuous mode of manually resizing the CAD and CAM window to get them to fit screen requirements that constantly change based on what the user is doing. Please note I'm still unable to determine if it's BobCADCAM or Tensor who controls what happens on the CAD side. If BobCADCAM does not control what's happening perhaps it's time to either require Tensor to license BobCADCAM the source code or to move away from Tensor and develop your own. In any case as the situation now stands it's a cobbled together mess.

The following is an example of what I consider to be a good UI implementation. I'm not going to use a competitive CADCAM solution because I can make my point with a comparison to a $40 shareware application that is constantly a top choice by those who rate software. It's constantly a top choice for damn good reason. The application is a $40 text editor which is not competitive to sales of BobCADCAM. BobCADCAM management and it's software developers would tremendously benefit from looking at and implementing what is in the UI of this product:

www.ultraedit.com

I could have named almost any other CADCAM application to illustrate my point but why do so when I can name a $40 application who's UI puts BobCADCAMs current one to shame for both efficiency and ease of use... not to mention the enjoyment factor that comes from using an application with a well though out UI that does not fight the user at every turn.

Rotation, panning and zooming / unzooming of a rendered / shaded model while working on the part model is also badly needed in BobCADCAM . Further, I would suggest a right click of the mouse in order to enable rotation, dynamic zooming / unzooming and pan. It wastes a users time having to move to the Global UCS or an icon to do this.

I would label everything I have listed above as a basic need for a CADCAM system. New features should not be added to BobCADCAM until the basics are implemented correctly.

Finally, while it's not a basic need, now is the time for BobCADCAM management and BobCADCAM software developers to think about ways of eliminating dialog boxes that block the model being worked on and move instead to allowing users to imput needed info under a tab in the permanently dockable tabbed tree / explorer that I mentioned earlier in this post.

jon


"I may have many faults, but being wrong ain't one of them." ... Jimmy Hoffa