| This year, Autodesk Inventor will have been available to the public for 10 years! The acceleration that we feel as we age is compounded when you work in the world of CAD.
If you had asked me fi ve years ago what Inventor 2010 would be able to do, my guess would’ve probably come up shy of what was available in Inventor 2008. The power, fl exibility, and ease of use contained in the 2010 release of Inventor is far beyond anything I could’ve honestly believed possible.
With that come a few questions. How do you learn it all? Can someone know everything about every tool? Most important, does anyone really need to know them all? In 11 years of working with commercial users and 2 years of working with those in academia, some things have become readily apparent.
First, most users use only a fraction of the tools available to them, and those are typically the tools they learned fi rst. Sometimes that’s all they need. Sometimes, though, a far better and easier option is a mouse click away—but the realities of deadlines and the ability to hammer something into shape using the tool they know makes it scary to explore new tools.
In writing this book, I wanted to use the process of developing the parts of a product to explore many different tools. In fact, you won’t try the most commonly used tools until well after you’ve explored others. This should be a learning experience. It should also be easy. The irony of people sticking to the basics is that the basic tools are the most tedious and diffi cult to use. The advanced tools do more of the work for you and are easier to learn.
I genuinely enjoy using Autodesk Inventor, and I wholly believe that as amazing as it is today; the future will be just as surprising as anything I’ve seen to this point. |
