ProEngineer WildFire 2.0 Student Edition

Rating:
Summary: How can a program be this awful?
Review: I would love to give this a rating of less than one star, but Amazon.com won't allow it.

Where to begin?

It seems like PTC, losing customers to the vastly superior SolidWorks, has released a new program (WILDFIRE!!! pretty sweet name, if you're 12 years old). Or maybe they just dressed up their old Pro/E 2001. They changed some colors to make it a little more hip, but unfortunately the new colors don't contrast, making it difficult to see what the hell you're drawing. I think pale orange on grey is a very nice color scheme, just not for a CAD program. What was wrong with white on dark blue?

It still has its clunky, unintuitive interface, and it still won't ask if you want to save before you close it. I just accidentally opened up a window earlier this afternoon in the program. I hit the X in the corner a few times, and it stayed open. Selected File > Close, and the window finally closed, along with the rest of the program. I lost about a half hour's worth of work. My fault for not saving, but I guess I'm just used to programs that give you the option to save before closing.

They got rid of the little menu on the right hand side of the screen. That's not really a problem for me, but maybe they should update the help file accordingly. The help file still refers to that menu from time to time. For instance, in order to change the units, you select "Units" from the Setup menu, but it doesn't tell you how to open the setup menu. At one point while I was working, an error occurred while the program was trying to regenerate a part, and the Setup menu that I had been looking for earlier appeared. What this tells me is that they didn't rewrite the program without that menu, they just left the code in and suppressed it. That's probably the best example of why this is a terrible program. They didn't spend any time trying to make it better. They just tried to make it appear more like SolidWorks.

I also don't know how to make holes. Pro/E 2001 had a great way to make and array holes in a part. From what I understand, people in Industry also have not been able to figure it out. They do what I do, and make a circular cut. What a waste of time compared to the way it used to be.

I tried to email PTC to tell them all these problems, but you can't contact them unless you're registered on the site. As far as I can tell, there's no way to register. That's why I came here.

Don't buy this program. It's horrendous. You are much better off with SolidWorks. I'm graduating college this spring, and when I do I'll miss just about everything about this school. With one huge exception. Pro/E Wildfire.

Oh, and if you're running Wildfire and you open up a file that you created using Pro/E 2001, Wildfire corrupts the file so that you can't open it in 2001 anymore. You're locked into using Wildfire, so essentially you can't get a refund for the program once you've used it... unless you're OK with losing your work.