Attending the COFES 2008 (Congress on the Future of Engineering Software) conference has been a nice surprise. For one thing, the event is being held at the beautiful Scottsdale Plaza Resort near Phoenix, Arizona. Think bright blue skies, hot sunny days, and unusual fauna such as the bottle brush tree, which has what looks like thousand of red, ...

Badly designed products are bad enough. But what might be worse -- annoying or senseless designs. They add on layers of unecessry complexity, making it exceedingly difficult for us poor slobs trying to use the things. Case in point is a new kind of torque screw. No argument that torque screws in general make a lot of sense -- once you tighten a ...

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 ...

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 ...

New, so-called direct manufacturing methods will soon let individuals make products at home using high-tech, smaller versions of industrial equipment. Smaller tool and die shops are now using laser sintering machines, previously the province only of large manufacturers, to ''print'' or build 3D parts directly from CAD models. Rust ...