Best Of

Jlabs said:

Obviously OnShape doesn't care at about non-professional users, makers, or hobbyists. Removing private documents from free plans is fine, but not offering an affordable pricing tier for non-professionals who would prefer to work on their designs privately is pretty crappy. Off to Fusion 360... 

I agree with you. They basically just cut out the hobbyist small startup who is trying to work on getting a commercial product going so they can afford to move up. I know they are trying to protect their commercial product because someone's got to pay for the development, but I think this is a step in the wrong direction. They need to add an in between tier that the semi-pro can afford who is working out of pocket.

When I saw the email, I was hopping they had added a pricing tier in between free and pro that reflected what I needed; instead they pretty much made Onshape useless for me. I'm a single user working on private designs that may someday make money. I have no need of the whole collaboration suite of features, maybe vital to a big company, useless to me. All I needed was the same 5 or 10 private documents with a little more storage space and I'd be happy to pay for that increase in space, but not $100-$125 for something that obviously isn't a cost issue when they give 5gb+ for public docs.

As it is, I already bought a Fusion 360 license at much less cost. I only pay $40 a month for access to the entire suite of Adobe products. Here they gave me a choice between paying nothing or a lot and now even the nothing isn't worth it. Disable the collaboration, BOM, etc on the free and start-up tiers, make that enterprise only. Give another 100mb/private per $10/month on a start-up tier and I would have happily paid. That's all I would have needed.

Obviously OnShape doesn't care at about non-professional users, makers, or hobbyists. Removing private documents from free plans is fine, but not offering an affordable pricing tier for non-professionals who would prefer to work on their designs privately is pretty crappy. Off to Fusion 360... 

I have been impressed with the excellent help on this forum and now I am sharing a new feature called Scale that I created with that assistance.

I needed to be able to place a scale (think an axis with labels for the ticks) on objects in my drawings. The Scale feature is meant to be a fairly general solution to that problem.

• Scale can be used on cylinders and planes
• Scale is hard coded to create labels for linear scales using base 10. It could be easily modified for other bases. 
• The length of the scale is always in the direction of the x axis as defined by the mate connector in location.
•  The height of the scale (height of the text and length of the ticks) is in the direction of the y axis  
•  The z axis is pointing normal to surface
•  The maximum value of the scale can be any number. If the maximum scale value is not a natural tick label, then the scale is still drawn to be precisely the correct length for the maximum scale value with extra minor ticks at the end of the end of the scale and extra space as needed. Here is a scale with a maximum value of 19.65 in a length of 0.5 meters. 
• The number of tick labels is set to be a maximum of 11. Set the text size as needed so the text doesn't overlap. GIven that the text can be rotated and that the number of digits is variable I didn’t not attempt to automate the size of the text to not overlap.
• The text can be rotated and the scale can be rotated independently.

@rod_muirhead943
Believe me, when we get around to implementing this functionality, we won't only have "Rebuild" and "Force rebuild", we'll leapfrog the competition by adding "Force force rebuild" and even maybe "Force force force rebuild"!