WF5 GUI.......Like? Love? Hate? Indifferent?

My overall rank is 4!

But about Drawing 5 for fanciness and 3~2 for productivity, "now we have a preview and the interface got better in my opinion, now we have to follow a procedural way to create the 2d document and I kinda like that." (that statement was my first impression and still works for simplier parts, but in practical terms doesn't work like that)

The problem is that we are obligated to be at the right tab to perform right mouse commands and even for selection (there is the ALT key but ah....), at the begining I found it nice and not a problem, but after working in some intense drawing tasks I found it disgustingly annoying and too much mouse traveling...

Regards,

Guilherme Rocha

Message was edited by: Guilherme Rocha

Without getting quite as angry (Heaven knows I have done so in private), I have to agree with Frank on several basic points. I am tempted to withhold comment until we see "Lightning", but, like Frank, I am expecting more graphic silliness including too many icons on ribbons, etc. It appears that the big thing will be the addition of "Direct Modeling" options.

(1) The repeated "Less Mouse Clicks" claims made rev after rev remind me of the advertisment claims made for cutting tools in the mags serving the machining discipline. If all the "20% faster" claims made for carbide inserts over the last 30 years were really true, the cumulative effect would be that all machining of any complexity would now be accomplished in microseconds. Here's a simple everyday example from within Pro/E: When many of us first started (before any icons), opening an assembly was: Mode/Assembly/Retrieve. The mouse barely moved, and it was straight up and down in the menu column. (Admittedly, one of the problems in those days was menu depth, but this is not an example of that at all.) Now what do you have to do?: (1) File/Open or one pick of the icon, (2) Watch one of our beloved modern Dialog Boxes splash open and move the mouse way across the screen to pick a Drop-Down-List arrow, (3) Watch the list open and move again in a slant direction to pick Assembly. In reality, each of the mouse movements #2 & #3 involves a rapid movement to the approximate location followed by a slower "focussing" motion. The original icon and the drop-down arrow are also smaller targets than the old linear names in the menu, and the selections do not easily come into view in a confined linear space anymore. THIS IS NOT AN IMPROVEMENT.

(2) In spite of the aforementioned menu depth problem and the series of Done/Done/Done-Return/Done's that you used to have to do, I was so happy at that time that PTC had not succumbed to the international icon love affair. Without a doubt your brain will extract meaning much more quickly from a series of words than it will from spatially scattered arbitrarily fanciful icons. I remember the first time I saw the Windshield Wiper and wondered what the devil it was; turns out it was just PTC's version of everyone else's Paintbrush. (I understand "Repaint" without training.) I now see the value of a mixture. 30, maybe 40, familiar frequently-used icons around the perimeter of the screen are useful in combination with menus, but their wholesale application is A STEP BACKWARDS. A good, common example of this is the series of Depth Option icons; you can WAIT for the pop-up help description, but they are not instantaneously clear like a simple list. RMB still gives you the list, but it's an extra step. And now for the Second Direction you have to pick the Shape tab, then the drop-down arrow for Side 2, then the option, moving all over the place all the time. The dashboard in and of itself has some nice time-saving improvements, but excessive obscure icons just create brain strain.

(3) How about putting a hole through a rectilinear block (any of you engineers ever done that before?)? It used to be pick-pick-pick, and you were done. Now we have the advent of the Control button, Secondary References and all the rest. Placement drag handles look sophisticated but they're way slower than just picking sides of the block or Datum Planes. (Once again you have multi-phase mouse movement: hone in on the drag handle, then start up again with the dragging, then release; Query Select is also now more of a problem. Datum Planes are no longer as quick to pick for reference either. Sure, size-dragging can sometimes be nice, but much of the rest of it is encumbering.

(4) The redundant mixture of methods from various revs is also really delightful. Ever needed to Redefine a Variable Section Sweep when it went into First-Aid-Kit mode?

Well, the examples go on and on. We do get real substantive functionality improvements rev-to-rev, but the interface changes have been a bewildering hodge-podge for years.

At the recent ptc/user convention in Florida, there were encouraging recognitions of general difficulty and unreliabilty on the part of senior management at PTC. I found the commitments from these people earnest and believable, so, for the time being, I'm willing to be optimistic. I just hope this slickness sickness will come to an end before we get to Lightning 6.0!

David

Come on all you experienced users, don't be afraid to chime in. It'd be to your benefit to voice your opinion.

I don't mind a new version every 2 years.......if it's logical and well thought out. WF wasn't. This isn't.

My main gripe since the WF days is, why do I have to TOTALLY relearn the GUI every major rev? That's ridiculous. It'd be like having to relearn to drive every time you buy a new car. Nobody would stand for that in the real world, yet somehow they'll just accept it in the realm of software. We may get, what, 10% new features MAX, yet we have to relearn 100% of the GUI? Seriously????

As I said, pre-WF I looked forward to every new release. The releases were simply a logical and intuitive extension of what came before with ONLY the changes needed to add the new features, and it was an easy transition to the new rev. Now I really dread each new rev like this, because I see the productivity of our users come to a dead stop for months. Every time. Not everyone can afford to send all their users to their training at over $1k a pop. And, make no mistake, making that money is what those changes are all about. So those companies just get screwed......or switch to something else. I'd say, after become proficient in Solidworks as well, that those are the main reasons people are switching and PTC is drastically losing market share. As a company, especially a small one, who wants to buy into something far more expensive than SW (for the extra capabilities that aren't often used), AND be expected to pay expensive maintenance AND have to totally retrain all it's users every few years at great expense? That's exactly why one company I worked for did it. And, wanting to stay on Pro/E instead of the inferior SW, I left it.

Come on guys, get back to your core business. LISTEN to your customers.

overall 4

only big issue I encounter ist the ribbon in drawing mode... the tabs should automatically follow selected items ... (example: double click an annotation and the annotate tab gets automatically activated).. or at least an option to put such a behaviour on.

Martin

What I hate, is the pastelly unconfigurable interface, and yet we still don't have a MDI for the UI.

Look at the CG world of Maya, Cinema4D, SILO and others where you can totally customize the interface to dock and partition the UI elements how you and how you work. I think it's silly we get a couple of toolbars, and a pile of floating windows that can't be captured and retained into the UI.

The 1980s is over, lets see some object oriented approach to the UI and ditch those UGLY colours. At least let me control how I want the window colours to be, or at the very least abide by the Windows UI colour settings.

The WF UI in my opinion is outdated, too programmer oriented and needs rethinking.

So my rating is 2.

Hi all

I should rate 4.

My most common trouble is with bom balloons. Honestly I had more problems with all those popping up windows. They ask you things, you do not think possible or present you things you do not understand nor need. Those are things you have to learn. I have to say once you know your way it works fast if you can use the middle mouse button everytime.

I heve learned pro-e in a version before wildfire (3 months) and now I work on WF5 since 1 year. So will anyone believe me or think I yet dont know?

Regards

Chris

I rate it a 3. Essentially it would be a 4. I just don't see why they had to rip the look and feel of Microsoft Office Suite Applications.

Solid 1

I hate it! WF5 ribbon is awful. All of my users hate it and are very frustrated with it. With good reason too; it takes longer to do everything in drawing mode because of the extra clicks. Also, it's confusing because, as discussed previously, it returns to the pre-Wildfire method of action-object instead of object-action.

I have a couple enhancement requests in to PTC on this issue, but I don't expect them to bear much fruit.

PTC: DROP THE RIBBON INTERFACE!

I created a group and a poll for WF5 angst:

http://communities.ptc.com/groups/wf5-ribbon-angst