Conference Report 2000

Again, this was a great opportunity for an energetic consultant to get to see even more of the world. Gaining confidence in finding my way round this amazing country, I ventured first to New York.

Totally wiped out after the flight and the 4-hour trek from Newark to Hempstead, Long Island, Friday quickly became a thing of the past. Saturday, I was up bright and early (the first time about 3.00 am!) and was in Manhattan by 0830. My plan was to get up Empire State before the crowds arrived. Now who was I to think I was early. The queue for the tickets was 1 hour long! So, because I was due to meet my good friend Harcharan Bagga of Leviton at 10.00 I got only as far as the ticket office. No big deal. I met Harcharan and got to see the whole town in the hands of the best NY guide you could ever find.

First stop was the UN building followed by Central Park. Now, for the uninformed out there; Central Park is about as big as a small English county! You can get lost in it (we almost did) and unless you have 2-3 days you will only see about 2.5% of the whole area. An amazing coincidence was finding a statue of H. C. Andersen whose home town in Denmark I'd visited only a week earlier!

Next on the tour was the Statue of Liberty. Having done the tourist thing about 2 million times, Harcharan new the best way of seeing it. Don't go to it - go past it - on the Staten Island ferry. Cheap, quick and with the added bonus of giving you a brilliant view of the Manhattan skyline on the way.

After the ferry we headed back, over the Verazano-Narrows, to Brooklyn and back into Manhattan. Got to see the World Trade Center and then it was lunch in Greenwich Village. Sadly, Harcharan had to leave me there so, armed with "Lonely Planet", I took off to explore such wonders as Times Square, Broadway etc. A stop at the local Hard Rock Cafe for T-shirts and then it was back to the Empire State. It was amazing, long queues again, but I was on the 86th before sunset (view, view, view) and after so I got to see the whole city in daylight and neon.

Sunday, I traveled "Amtrak". Excellent, air-conditioned trains with a better-than first class standard, I left sunny New York and watched the weather get worse and worse. It started to look like winter by the time we hit Delaware. Sitting in the cool air-conditioned train is deceiving. Upon leaving the train you realize that they're not fooling around when they say DC's hot in August. Phew!

Arriving at the Hyatt Regency I bumped into Eddie Zihlman (of digital camera fame) who immediately showed me his new digital camera! Cool stuff Eddie (what would we webmasters do without you?)

It was good to see that most of the old gang already there. Eddie Z., Ray Gordon, Theresa Wrazel and a new face: Ray Dauphinais. We learned later that due to problems with flights (United), lots of people were delayed and some didn't turn up at all!

The conference got off to a good start. Tilman Schad and Uli Mahle were there inspiring everyone with their news of soaring sales and technical enhancements. The good news for the ME10 users out there is that there will be support for multiple drawings in 11.0 (see Enhancement List). The demos of new SolidDesigner functionality were awesome (as they say over there). Watch out Pro, SW, SE :-) Not forgetting WorkManager.....

Later it was my turn to entertain. I introduced a technique I call Active Graphical Icons. Not exactly something that is easy to explain, but it uses the icon creation function (CHR 255+CHR X....) to display data on screen within menus and tables. My original plan was to describe the use of these icons in my Accuracy Advisor product. But, in order to increase the amount of material to fit my slot of 50 minutes I created a new application just before leaving for the conference.

Here's a couple of screen dumps of the display table with the multi-coloured, active icons.

This table shows the heights of my 4 children from when they were born up until the conference.

For each child it gives the date of birth, and all the height data we have been able to gather from over 14 years ago!

Each child curve is illustrated in its own colour. Itself a challenge when you know that an icon can only have one foreground and background colour!

In this configuration, picking a point on a curve draws a green vertical hairline representing the date at which the measurements were taken. At the same time, the table is scrolled to the appropriate row.

Note that there is also a scale on the X and Y axes. Each mark on the X-axis indicates one year. Each mark on the Y-axis represents 10cm (apx. 4 inches to you Americans!)

In this configuration, achieved by selecting the Abs/rel command, each child's growth curve is compared. By doing this we can see precisely how quickly they have grown in relation to one another.

Notice that Thomas and Kristina have almost identical curves (and are the shortest for their age!). Rebecca, the youngest started slow but has, since the age of 3, been the closest to her big brother Tobias.

Picking a point in the icon gives the height corresponding to that point.

If you would like to try out this little "application" feel free to download it here. Save the macro file activeicon.mac and the data file active.dat in the same directory and input "activeicon.mac" from ME10. The table will appear automatically.

I was very pleased with the response to my presentation. One of the comments was that this is probably the best ever use of a "bug"! (The multi-color icons are the result of overflowing coordinates in the CHR 255+..)

During questions, we discussed the possible uses for Active Graphical Icons. One idea was to use it to illustrate spring deflection and force in relation to the spring dimensions. "Watch this space" as they say.

The conference CD contains examples of the use of active graphical icons in Accuracy Advisor.

Monday evening we attended the conference dinner. A glorious trip down the Potomac getting views of the Jeffersen Monument, the Washington Memorial, Watergate(!) and lots of bridges. CoCreate took the opportunity to dish out the prizes for various competitions including the SolidDesigner and ME10 macro competitions. Bruce Fisher of LH Carbide won the SolidDesigner competition and Paolo Marchetto of Italy won for ME10. Ray Dauphinais of Industri-Art Design won the draw from the other entrants. Congratulations to you all.

(For a full report on the next days activities I recommend that you take a look at this link. Thanks for doing such a good job Ray.)

It's always good to have something new and unexpected to present at such an event and I had the honor of introducing a compilation of ME10 macros I've put together for CoCreate. These macros, which cover a wide area of ME10 use, will be available soon.

On the last day of the conference it was a great pleasure to announce the winner of the Accuracy Advisor competition. By answering 12 questions about accuracy (decimal/fractions and metric/English etc.) you could win a full license of the enhanced version of last year's ME10 macro winner. The winner was John Bruce of LI-COR, Inc., Nebraska. Congratulations John. It was quite amazing really. After accepting his prize John told me that he had actually been looking at Accuracy Advisor with a mind to buying a license as he had a lot of "problem" drawings to fix back home. It was obvious that he appreciated the prize!

The 2000 CoCreate conference was yet another great success. I was told that there were over 200 attendees plus all the best CoCreate people. To some extent the PDM/OneSpace profile is getting more dominant. For example, there were only 2 ME10 presentations (mine and Theresa Wrazels). The number of SolidDesigner sessions has naturally grown but even that topic is becoming partially overshadowed by OneSpace and WorkManager. I would estimate that CoCreate were behind 80-90% of the papers. In future there should be more CAD users showing-off their expertise and know-how. Think about it for next year. Which incidentally, will be back in cool - oh so cool Colorado!

PS. I have since received some feedback from John Bruce regarding his work with Accuracy Advisor. John said: "Needless to say that I am impressed with Accuracy Advisor, I have given it a run on just one drawing here since winning it at the US Users Group meeting. Accuracy Advisor found and helped me fix 6 problems - all related to edited dimensions. It only took me about 5 minutes to find AND fix the errors in the drawing that I worked on, not bad since this was my very first time running Accuracy Advisor. Now that I am more familiar with Accuracy Advisor I could do the same task in about half the time.


Bruce Fisher - Winner of the SolidDesigner macro competition.	John Bruce - Winner of the Accuracy Advisor competition.