When anything interferes with drawings it is a bad idea and should have on and off options. I am willing to tolerate large installation files. Gigabytes are cheap. When software controls what must remain an engineer’s (or drafter’s) choice CAD software has failed. The new drawing “enhancements” in SW 2010 are terrible. We are forced on the mercy of what a software designer has assumed for us. While it made sense for marketing directors it makes zero sense to a drafter. Save the bells and whistles for the design environment. NOT the detailing environment. A clean uncluttered drawing demands clean and uncluttered work environments and that includes the SW drawing environment. If you treat the drawing like a manual hand drawn paper drawing just imagine everywhere you want to move your pencil someone has placed a stickynote where you want to draw your next line. Even when you take away one stickynote someone is behind you to place another one on your drawing. The solution is not to “get use to it” but to take away the pad of stickynotes.

First, let me say that those who say that we (SolidWorks) should have caught the problems with the Dimension Palette before it was released in SolidWorks 2010 are absolutely right. I’ll go further and say that, as Manager of User Experience Design at SolidWorks, I’m responsible. My team should have discovered the usability problems with the Dimension Palette, and we should have ensured that they were fixed before it was released. Our review and usability testing program let you, our users, down.

As has already pointed out, we have released a temporary registry workaround in the SolidWorks Forums (and available right here on Rocksolid Perspective too – look over there to the right for the .reg files!). This will completely disable the Dimension Palette. In addition, as Rob Rodriguez has alluded to in his comment, we have a longer term fix. I’m happy to say that the changes we have made to the Dimension Palette will be in the next service pack. These changes eliminate the problem of it popping up in your way all the time. The Dimension Palette becomes much more of an “on demand” tool rather than “always there.”

Finally, let me give a pitch for our usability testing program. In addition to the more traditional beta testing, we constantly run smaller, more focused usability tests on features under development. Typically, these take an hour or less, and they can be conducted right from your office – we use the phone, and web conferencing software. Often, we will run development builds of the software here on our local machines, but give you mouse and keyboard input so that you can have “hands on” experience, and tell us directly what you like, and what you don’t like. We run these sessions all year around. One of the best ways to ensure that nothing like the “dimension palette fiasco” (Jason’s words) ever happens again is YOUR PARTICIPATION. Do you have time to spend a half-hour or an hour, maybe once or twice a year, giving us direct feedback on features under development? Want to give us input even BEFORE beta? That’s the purpose of the usability testing program. If you go to http://www.solidworks.com/usability you will find a link to a short survey for signing up.

Tom Spine
Manager, User Experience Design
DS SolidWorks Corp.

the registry files will only work with sp2.1 i was told. sorry, i should have stated that in my original post.

sorry it took me so long to respond back to you. i would agree with you but i would think that this testing would come from beta users, not necessarily solidworks testing. i think both may be to blame for this.

i heard rumors that this is going to be changing soon. we will see what happens!