Hey folks!

Just so you don’t think this blog has been hijacked, let me introduce myself. My name is Rhu (it’s short for Rhuaridh, but I’ve been Rhu since I was little) and I’m the newest, most attractive member of the ShapeSpace team. I’ll probably be posting on here from time to time so do not be alarmed.

SolidWorks Version Release

We’re getting very close to the release of our PartBrowser and it’s all getting very exciting over here at ShapeSpace. Frantic meetings behind closed doors, long discussions in front of drawing boards and more cups of coffee than our ‘Branvalore Bonamat Coffee Maker’ can handle. For those of you that have tried PB and liked it, the time has come when you can get your (virtual) hands on it. We ran the beta tests quite recently with great success and we’ve already had some great feedback from some of the Beta testers so far. We will be sending out a formal questionnaire to all the Beta testers very soon so that you can all have your say on PB and that will give you guys more of a say into the software that you’ll be using. With the aid of your input (and hopefully kind words), we have a provisional date for rolling out the SolidWorks version on Monday 9^th March. So save that date!

So we want you to complete these questionnaires that are being sent out so we can gauge how you feel about PB. It shouldn’t take long and once you’ve done it, you’ll get a prize for all your hard work! Promise.

What have we been doing?

So what’s been going on here at ShapeSpace? Well we decided at the extreme last minute to attend SWW09. Our MD, Andrew Sherlock, tore himself away from -2 degree Celsius and rain in Edinburgh to join the masses assembling in Orlando, Florida for what was an extremely successful trip. Andy spent most of his time meeting people for drinks, going to the exhibitions on show, getting in a few more drinks, attending General Sessions and catching some of the keynote speakers, twittering at the bar (“Anyone fancy catching up over a drink?”) and generally trying to meet as many members of the SolidWorks community as possible. Being from United Kingdom, Twitter is the method of choice for communicating with all our friends, so it was a welcome breath of fresh air to actually hear everyone speaking and have proper conversations which were longer than 140 characters. I think you can guarantee that ShapeSpace will be back for SWW10 in Anaheim next year. For more of the same please!

Other than that, we’ve been keeping most of our internal projects going, working on releasing updating and releasing PartBrowser to one and all and trying not to get too injured playing football (or soccer to most of you). March is going to be a big month for ShapeSpace so you should keep your eyes on this blog or add it to you feed and keep up-to-date with any advances, changes, thrills and spills.

And remember, the provisional release date of PB is the Monday 9^th March so keep yourself free for that day!

Josh Mings from SolidSmack has written a pretty comprehensive review of PartBrowser.Read it here…

I spent yesterday morning doing an online demo of PartBrowser for Al Dean of Develop3D. He’s been kind enough to write about us on his blog. He says some nice things about PartBrowser so I thought I’d link to him from here.

There are a few other bloggers who have written about us:

1. Joe Moak has a website, ‘Hey, That’s a Great Idea’, looking at ‘Products, services, and technologies that enable and inspire’ - which is itself a great idea! He wrote a little about us a week or two back.




2. Professor Jonathan Corney from Strathclyde University wrote about us on his Academic Facets blog. We’ve worked quite closely with him developing our core shape search technology, so he knows what he’s talking about.




3. Jon Sutcliffe over at the Synchronous Technology blog also has a post about PartBrowser with a nice video. Jon works for Ingenea, one of our resellers.

Welcome, we’re glad you’ve found our new PartBrowser blog!

Finding things, particularly product data, is what we’re about here at ShapeSpace. Everyone’s used to using search engines to find what they want on the web. But what about product data stored on company networks or product data management (PDM) and product lifecycle management (PLM) systems? We think search for product data could be much better.

For example, imagine you’re a maintenance engineer with a broken part but no idea of its part number. How do you identfy it with current software? Or perhaps you’re a designer wanting to save money and time by reusing an old part in a new product, but you can’t remember what it was called.

Product data is different from other kinds of data. Along with textual data, there’s 3D CAD data, finite element models, drawings etc.. This non-textual data is opaque to normal indexing and search methods. We are working on novel information retrieval techniques specifically designed for product data. These include indexing and searching for parts by 3D shape - the technology that forms the core of our first product

About Us…

Andrew Sherlock

I’m Andrew Sherlock, the Managing Director of ShapeSpace Ltd. We’re a spin-out from the University of Edinburgh in Scotland. Some of the search-by-shape technology we use was intially developed at the School of Engineering. We also have close links with researchers in this area at Strathclyde University’s Department of Design, Manufacture & Engineering Management.

I’m a mechanical engineer by training and have a PhD in Shape Optimisation. This involved automating the search for the best shape for mechanical component, giving me a background in search techniques in general - and particularly applying them to engineering design problems. You may also see posts here from co-founder Frank Mill (Frank.Mill@shapespace.com) and Prasanna Jagadeesan (Prasanna.Jagadeesan@shapespace.com), our lead developer.

PartBrowser…

Screen shots of PartBrowser

PartBrowser is a desktop search application for CAD files. It’s our first product that incorporates our search by shape technology. It helps users find their CAD files on local hard drives and networks. It’s currently released for Solid Edge and we’re beta testing a SolidWorks version (if you’d like to beta test the SolidWorks version sign up here).

There will be much more about PartBrowser, its capabilities and how people are using it, in future posts.

Why are we writing a blog?

We’ve started this blog for two main reasons:  to keep readers informed about PartBrowser and to provide a way for our customers and potential customers to communicate with us.

As PartBrowser is a new product we are very keen to hear what people think about it. How can it be improved?  Which features do you like or dislike?  Are there any bugs? We’d value your opinion on any aspect of PartBrowser from features to pricing. Feedback will help us produce a better peice of software.

You can leave comments on our posts below or add suggestions using the ‘feedback’ tab on the left-hand side of these pages. We’ll do our best to reply quickly to any questions or suggestions.

Finally,

Over the next few weeks we’ve got a number of blog posts planned. We’ll be talking about:

• PartBrowser itself,
• how some of our customers are using PartBrowser,
• some tutorials to help existing customers get the most out of PartBrowser,
• the shape search technology we’ve developed with the University of Edinburgh and Heriot-Watt University,
• what our future plans are for PartBrowser,
• future products we’re developing to help search through product data based on our search technologies.

If there’s anything in particular you’d like us to write about let us know. We hope you’ll find something of interest here!

Andy Sherlock, Managing Director

We don’t have any tutorials to show you quite yet! But there’ll be some coming in the next week or so. In the meantime have a look at the videos on the ‘Features’ page of our website.

Andrew Sherlock