According to CEO Jeff Ray, over 4,000 people are attending the SolidWorks World 2009 event being held in Orlando, Florida over the next few days. Although times are tough, that is not evident at this show. Attendees are upbeat and the theme ''innovation'' predominates. The Great Depression spawned nylon, car radios, and everyone's favorite -- ...

SolidWorks just held its annual Media event in Barcelona, Spain to showcase Version 9. The city is a pastel jewel full of palm trees, international travelers, and mind-blowing architecture by Gaudi. I took a stroll earlier on the boardwalk by the Mediterranean Sea. People here are quite sophisticated -- a topless ...

A few other things gleaned from SolidWorks 2008: -- One conference theme was that of teaching kids engineering through robotics. Robotic contests mentioned included ROBOCON, FIRST, and ROBO Cup. Kids can use 3D ContentCentral, a free service on the SolidWorks Web site for locating, configuring, downloading, and requesting 3D parts and assemblies, ...

Day Four, Live from SolidWorks World 2008Don Norman spoke today on how to tie engineering and emotional design. He showed us an images of salt and pepper shakers as an example of bad design. They were burnished stainless steel. One shaker had a hole in the top, and the other shaker had five holes in the top. Norman asked the audience, ''Which ...

Day Three, live from SolidWorks World 2008:Announced today at the opening session of the SolidWorks 2008 show was a new program called 3Dvia Composer -- formerly Seemage -- that Dassault recently purchased. It is a Web-based product that works with SolidWorks to deliver 3D content for non-engineering personnel such as marketing and sales.A few ...

Day Two: Jeff Ray, CEO of SolidWorks, says the show has so far drawn 4,400 attendees. In the future, he wants to see more sharing between DS technologies and SolidWorks. He says software developers cannot afford to ''fall in love with their own technologies.'' Companies should never think that they own customers. Nobody does. Customers can pick ...

Day 1: Saturday Jan 19 This year's event is being held in San Diego, Calif., a city I have not visited before. I've heard many stories about its beauty, especially the colored neon lights lining the top edges of highrise buildings. An 11 pm taxi ride from the airport to the hotel showed off the cityscape at night, and the view is ...

Web-based programs, downloadable software, and virtual worlds are now letting us do more and more, and all without shelling out a dime. For example, Web-based software such as Autodesk's Project Draw lets you create vector drawings for floor plans, electronic-cirtuit diagrams, user interface mockups, and the like. An intuitive ...