SkyCiv

[TLHS]

I'm taking a look at SkyCiv. It's interesting, because being able to do work on my laptop in locations where I don't have a great computer seems like a plus. Also, being able to license it for a month now and then might be a good thing. However, I jumped into the free trial and I'm not immediately blown away by the toolset. It feels like there are a reasonable, if a little limited, set of tools for constructing models.

But then it seems like it might be pretty awkward to work with and organize after it's built. It seems like there's no great way to look at loads as groups, sort all the various tabulated values and things like that. I'm also not all that excited about the fact that design module is labelled as a beta. That feels like it'd look super bad on me if there were ever an unexpected item that I didn't catch and it went the legal route. The standard of care for checking output from something labelled as beta feels like it might basically be "do all the work again using something else every time".

Is anyone using this for production work that might have an opinion? I'm going to play with it a bit and look at the video tutorials over the next week or so. Also, all analysis software has it's own foibles, so I'm open to the awkward bits partially being related to the workflows I have in my head from the software that I've become used to.

 

[TLHS]

To clarify, on further clicking around, it looks like it's the module that optimizes design and tries to select member sections for you that's in beta, not the design code check module.

That is not the same fundamental level red flag at all. Honestly, I can count the number of times that I've used a computerized optimizer on my fingers.