SolidWorks + iPhone 101

The evil-mastermind that is Josh Mings at SolidSmack.com has just posted a rather delightfully concise and in-depth tutorial on how to model up an iPhone case in SolidWorks. Check it out here.

How Suhr Guitars is creating music with the Mac

After taking a mooch around the Mac Pro web-site, I came across this rather interesting story in the Profile's section - on Suhr Guitars. Having paid his dues as a Senior Master Builder at the Fender Custom Shop, John Suhr opened up his own small factory building custom guitars to order in 1997. Partnering up with Steve Smith whose background is in CNC programming, John finally had total control over the entire process of building the ideal electric guitars and basses and with the company building building 150 custom instruments on a monthly basis, things are looking good. According to the story, "Everyone at Suhr Guitars agrees: the Mac has enabled them to advance the business in ways they never considered in the past."

Of course, the story discusses where the Macs are used, what software they run, but aside from a few mentions of CNC machining and a mention of Eagle PCB design (which runs not only OSX and Windows, but also Linux) there was no mention of the hardcore design tools we're really interested in.

So, to find out how they are driving product development, I shot the company over some questions to find out what the deal was, are they using their macs and windows-based design software? Well, I got a pretty rapid response from John Suhr, Founder of the company, who set the record straight.

Unfortunately some of my 3D programs I use on a daily basis are resisting getting with the program on the OSX platform. Such as Solidworks..... I do run Solidworks on my Macs with no problems but find the only reliable way is using boot camp and Windows XP. You also have to "fool" the graphics card to take advantage of "Real View" but that is more of a luxury anyway.

My other main 3D program is Rhino3D which is my go to program to get things done quickly. Rhino3D does have a Mac version in beta which functions very well so far but they are looking at another year for an official release. For Printed circuit board design for our electronics I use "Eagle 5.6" which is available in all operating systems, I wish more software companies would think this direction. I used to use Vellum on the Mac years ago when I worked at Fender Musical.

For business we use Filemaker heavily for all CRM, invoicing etc.

Being all Macs now for the internet, it has easily saved me 5 hours a week dealing with software and operating system problems.

Anything I can do to help spread the word and make these companies like SolidWorks realize they really need to get with the program, or many people like me will look elsewhere.

Thanks

John Suhr

There you go. I think we're starting to see something of a trend here, right? Particularly with SolidWorks. Last thing I want to do is turn this is a crusade, but having spent the last few months going over and over this issue with a great many people, there's a gut feeling that just adding or working out the issues with regards certifying Apple hardware, running Bootcamp, or working with the graphics vendors, makes huge sense. As John says, RealView is nice to have but "more of a luxury anyway".