Top 10 FloTHERM V10 Features – #11: Odds and Sods
A release so good it has 11 best top 10 features, very Spinal Tap. I thought I’d wrap up this series with a list of more minor, but imo, very useful features and finish off with some words on cultural idioms.
FloTHERM V10.0 and V10.1 together satisfy about 60 software enhancement requests as voted for on the Mentor IDEAS site for Mechanical Analysis Products, a strategy we’ve been committing to for a number of years now. It’s not always the big headline grabbing features that the most interesting though. Here are some of my personal less well known favourites:
- Indication of whether a loaded model has results or not. Done via a coloured icon in the bottom status bar in the Project Manager.
No more having to load a model and open the Profiles window to see whether there is any residual history.
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How many objects are selected? Now given directly, again in the Project Manager bottom status bar. If no objects are selected this changes to the total number of objects in a model. I benefit from this often in my use of FloTHERM, though to tell you the truth I’m not exactly sure why!
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I like the simplicity of shape moving and editing in Microsoft products. Needs no training. One thing that is missing from Office (but now not form FloTHERM!) is a double align on both centers, in one operation. Now a one button operation in V10.
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- Having a
list of recently used files/documents for quick access to recent data is quite standard nowadays. FloTHERM’s had this for a while. However it only worked if the selected project was in the current project solution directory. This has now been rectified. Loading a previous project will automtically force change of the solution directory and load the project.
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So many times I’ve started a solve only to suddenly realise that I’d forgotten to make some required tweak or modification to the model. The solver stops slowly as it finishes its current iteration then writes out all the solution data to disk. Sure, we could have added an ‘Are you sure?’ dialog each time the GO button was pressed. We’d be lynched though. Instead we’ve added an ‘Abort Solver Action’ feature that will terminate the solver executable immediately, no results written but you can get back and make the change asap. Hands up who remembers ‘kill -9’ on Unix?
Well, that’s it for V10. Development for V11 is well underway. FloTHERM ploughs ahead!
4th September 2014, Ross-on-Wye
p.s. O yes, idioms. Not sure where the phrase ‘odds and sods’ comes from, it’s in common use in the the UK though. ‘Odds and ends’ is the more common variant I suppose. There are a number of phrases that are perfectly acceptable to use in the UK but would raise eyebrows elsewhere, normally in the US. Yep, in the UK it’s perfectly acceptable to go out of the pub and ask someone if you could ‘bum a fag’. Also, a private school in the UK is referred to as a public school (well, it’s open to any member of the public to pay to send their children to!). This and other US/UK travel word tips can be found here.
