thinkdesign 6.(Product Announcement)

think3 gives its MCAD/CAID tool a facelift

Although think3's roots go back more than 20 years, the company entered the US market little more than two years ago, when its flagship product, thinkdesign, was officially born. Coming late to the market, think3 needed to introduce new ideas. For starters, it enabled users to avoid large upfront costs by renting the software on a yearly basis, maintenance included, for about the same price that most mid-range MCAD programs were charging just for yearly maintenance. Other differences included Internet distribution and a game-based learning tool.

However, the biggest difference regarding thinkdesign has been the program itself. Built on a modeling kernel developed at think3, as opposed to the licensed kernels most of its competitors use, the product was one of the first in the midrange spectrum to address both the mechanical CAD (MCAD) and computer aided industrial design (CAD) markets. By employing advanced surfacing as well as feature-based parametric design tools, think3 had hoped thinkdesign would capture a good share of both markets, but this has not happened yet. One of the reasons had to do with the user interface, which was not always intuitive. Though not impossible to learn, it often got in the user's way.

A New Face

To address this problem, Version 6 introduces many interface changes on several different levels. The first change is obvious as soon as one initiates the sketch creation process. On the Sketch toolbar, the Smart Profile icon is replaced with a Profile Mode button. Although this seems like a minor change, it makes the function of this tool immediately clear to the new user, who no longer has to try to figure out the meaning of the icons.

The Sketch tool, used to create lines, tangent arcs, and 3-point arcs, has been renamed Polyline and is now available only from the Drafting toolbar. Formerly, it appeared on both the Drafting and Sketch toolbars. By avoiding duplication of this icon, think3 has made the interface a lot cleaner and easier to understand.

However, this is just the beginning. When a user draws a Polyline, a pair of fields indicating the length and angle of the line now appears next to the endpoint as it is being dragged. Users can either employ these fields as a visual cue, or, by pressing the Tab key, toggle between them and key in a value. After a 2D shape is created, the Profile mode is exited and then a 3D command such as Linear Protrusion--used for extruding a solid--can be evoked. Linear Protrusion used to be called Linear Sweep, and this, too, is a good change as there used to be two Linear Sweep commands: one for solids and one for surfaces.