Customer Experience Program
And now something that I expect to cause controversy… The Customer Experience Program. Users of many programs, including WinZIP, MS Office, and Solid Works, have probably seen the installers ask for permission to share your usage data with the company. Until the last few weeks I considered this an imposition and generally didn’t participate. Now that I’ve seen evidence that my development efforts are not exactly aligned with the day-to-day behavior of my users, I see the point of these feedback programs. Very few...
read moreV3 Build 8 Uploaded
I just uploaded build 8 to the standard location. It fixes a bug that Randy found and adds the option to drag and drop a 3D file onto an already-open 3D file. This will give you the option of opening the new file or inserting it into the current file as a check surface. This is good for times when you want to define your own supports in a CAD program of if you want to add a shut-off surface to an open area. This capability has been available via scripting but it was never a first-class function so I don’t think...
read moreV3 Build 7 Posted
I just posted build 7 to the normal location, http://www.grzsoftware.com/v2dl.php . It includes a bunch of fixes and major performance improvements. It is also a nearly-complete build of V3. The only changes from here will be bug fixes, documentation updates, and translation updates. I had not expected to call V3 “done” this quickly but I started reading back through the postings here last week and I saw that V3 has been underway for the better part of the year. Somehow I thought it had only been a few months...
read moreNeed Some Help
I’m trying to get V3 R7 ready for release on Friday and I need some help on a dialog. I’ve added an option to save reliefs as STL files quickly rather than using the painful, and somewhat broken, polygon reduction code that I have now. I have the dialog below as a placeholder but the text is not good and I’m out of ideas. Any suggestions on how to label everything? Also, I haven’t gotten many bug reports on the last version and I’m sure there are bunches of bugs lurking. Please let me know what you’re...
read moreAnybody Still Using a Pentium 3?
I’m going to assume that few users are still using anything older than a Pentium 4/Celeron ( which were released in 2000) and make a few changes to MeshCAM. Starting with the P4, Intel/AMD made the SSE2 instructions available. Enabling them in Visual Studio gives MeshCAM a 6% boost in my test case without doing anything else. I expect that I can do better if I make changes to target these new instructions more explicitly. Between this and some other changes MeshCAM is running about 15-20% faster than the last...
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