I know a few readers will disagree, but I’ve come to the conclusion that Pro/Engineer (along with its various unholy spawn) is just about the worst piece of major commercial software available, at least in the engineering software market. Every time I use it, I discover breathtaking new depths of its shoddy programming and user interface design.
As an (admittedly long-winded) example, today I needed to add a simple label to a diagram. The label consisted of a numerical identifier, with an arrow pointing at a certain item. I had expected that, like the other items around it, there was hidden somewhere an automatically-generated and associative note for the item, and that I only needed to fish it out and tweak the aesthetics. Nope. For whatever reason, this not-especially-unique item did not have an auto-generated identifier like the dozens of similar items around it.
It looked like I would have to manually create the note, something which is not normally a challenging task. So, I told it I wanted a note with an arrowhead leader, and then attempted to pick the target item to attach the arrowhead to it…but it was as if the item did not exist: Pro/E would simply not select it.
Having come to expect bizarre and inconsistent behaviors of this sort on the part of Pro/E, I attempted to “trick” it into cooperating by creating a point entity on the item in the location where I wished the arrowhead to be. I again told Pro/E that I wanted a note with an arrowhead leader, and this time picked the newly-created point.
Whereupon Pro/E created my note (on the side of the item opposite where I had placed it) and the leader to the point I had selected…but without the arrowhead.
Attempting to apply an end symbol to the leader after-the-fact produced no results, regardless of which end symbol I tried to apply. I deleted the note and regenerated it, this time picking a different and more mundane item…and the note, leader, and arrowhead were all produced just as requested. However, attempting to modify the leader to point at the point object caused the note to revert to the same arrangement as before: it flipped to the opposite side, and the arrowhead disappeared from the leader line.
Having come to expect inexplicable and capricious behaviors of this sort on the part of Pro/E, I realized that I would have to “sketch” or manually create the arrowhead and leader. So, I set about drawing four lines: a long triangle with its sharp point on the point object, and a line bisecting the triangle and ending beside the note text, which I had created for a third time, this time without a leader.
But…
For whatever unknown reasons, Pro/E would not allow me to draw four simple lines. I would pick a location for a line endpoint, and the endpoint would appear somewhere else. I would select a previously-drawn line as a reference, so as to use its endpoints for a new line, and would get lines oriented to the reference in every orientation but the one I wanted. I finally got the leader line and the two long sides of the arrowhead drawn, but no matter what I tried, I could not get it to draw a simple line across the open end of the arrowhead.
The primary problem seemed to be that the cursor was snapping to grid points rather than to the endpoints of the lines I had already drawn and which I thought I was selecting. I would turn the snap-to-grid option off, only to find that the cursor was snapping to grid points anyway, because the snap-to-grid option had mysteriously turned itself back on. I systematically worked through every option and setting I could think of, but nothing would allow me to draw that one simple line.
Having come up against an insurmountable and almost supernatural behavior I had not expected, I was forced (after many “colorful” but fruitless voice commands directed at the workstation) to declare defeat and leave the arrowheads unclosed.
All this turned a trivial fix that should have taken less than a minute into an hour-long ordeal. Lest one think that this is an isolated event, the result of one unresolved bug, it isn’t — this sort of thing is a daily occurrence. When a resolution can be found, it is usually at the end of a time-consuming systematic search of all commands and functions which may conceivably have something to do with the matter at hand. The systematic search is requred because functions which do one thing in one context do not work at all the same way in another context, and may be called by some other name or not available at all. When a function exists and can be found, it often works in non-intuitive or completely counterintutive ways (and if you think the help files might actually, you know, help, think again).
The more I use Pro/E and its sibling packages, the more surprised and disappointed I am that anyone would pay good money for such an inferior product. The time (and therefore money) wasted as a result of the inefficiencies and flaws in the software must, in total, be truly staggering.
[Of course, that is just my personal opinion, and I don’t speak for my employer on this.]