I just downloaded it/installed it and it’s not anything to be excited over. Honestly it’s just a stripped down version of catia. just wondering how many people liked or disliked it?
After I tried the demo for a little while, I stopped using it, but forgot to delete it. I went to a TSA (technology student association) competition and entered in their 3D CAD compitition. My computer was going nuts for a while (mumble… mumble… Windows… mumble). I thought I had it fixed, but my copy of Inventor wasn’t working. After several re-installs it still didn’t work. The guy next to me had is SolidWorks CD that I borrowed, but that didn’t work right either. At this point, most people are already working. Suddenly I remembered I had Alibre. It worked. I did the proplem in about 1 hour (three hour time block, 1/2 hour spent fighting my computer). I didn’t really like it, but I thought, Oh well, I did it with realy bad software. I tried Inventor again, and It Worked! I was able to redo the whole thing in about 20 minutes (including the time to burn a disk as was required). 1 hour to model+10 minutes to save, burn, and lable versus 20 minutes to do all of it… I think Inventor is much better that Alibre.
As a side note, I do have a SW demo right now and I think that It’s prety good. It might have taken me about 25-30 minutes, but mostly because I wouldn’t have been really used to where things are.
I downloaded it and have started using it. So far it’s the only CAD software I have, but I hope to get hold of inventor shortly. Honestly, I can not really rate it because I have never used CAD software before, and I am still trying to learn how to use the program (I can’t really even figure out how to finish making a prototype robot frame.) But it is on my hard drive and I will use it till I get a substitute.
I donwloaded it but did not install since I have Inventor. I don’t know if I’ll ever find a use for it, but hey, you never know.
My major beef with it is that you can’t extrude areas of sketches, only the whole thing. That isn’t bad for very simple things, but when you have to get rid of all lines that you used to set it up in order to extrude, it’s tough.
Are you kidding me? That is just lame. And this was advertised as (from memory, website is gone) “one of the most powerful 3D parametric solid modelers rivaling programs in the $5K-$20K range”!?!? Pathetic
I can’t complain really, because it is free. But after the ads, and the 25 part restriction, and now this, now I REALLY have no reason to install it. Maybe I’ll burn it on a CD just to get this JUNK off my hard drive.
With extruding sketches, the hard part is if you were to try and revolve, you might have a line offset from your drawing as where you want to rotate, but Alibre wants to extrude that line too. Then it sees that that line has no area, thus no volume, thus an error. Also, to make a tube, you have to do the outside, followed by cutting out the inside.
Oh, and with creating technical drawings, there is some major problems with the dimentions, especially when zooming. I had lines all over my screen and even out of the Alibre window.
The graphics before you try and render with their add on software are like AutoCAD, medicore. You don’t expect good graphics from AutoCAD, but you do expect decent stuff from a modeler.
I will say that the company has great support and has a very aggressive releace schedual. If they can keep it up, in a few years, it might be fairly good.
That is just plain stupid. How more inefficient can it be? Maybe I’ll burn it onto a CD, and then put the CD in an old microwave. 
Why waste a CD on it? It was free, so why spend money on trashing it?