EnSight CFD 3.5.1

Wow, has it been a year since our last post on this blog. Sorry about that. We've been working in other web areas and kind of got slack here on EnSight CFD's blog.

There's a new version of EnSight CFD, version 3.5. The Free version now has all the same CFD readers as the paid version. And now there's an OpenFOAM reader for all to enjoy. The OpenFOAM reader even reads parallel OpenFOAM files without reconstructing them to single files! There's more to 3.5 but that's the highlights. Come check it out at www.ensightcfd.com or www.ceisoftware.com.

Over and out.

P.S. - also stay informed via our Facebook page, www.facebook.com/ceisoftware

EnSight CFD 3.0

Hey everyone we just released this week EnSight CFD 3.0.

The big news with 3.0 is that we now have a variable calculator. There are some other things like a text editor and support for structured (IJK) models. But the variable calculator is the biggest deal.

There is still both a free and paid versions. Free if your models are under 2 million cells and you don't need phone technical support, a few other minor differences. We are very excited about the rapid adoption of EnSight CFD. Even the free version means that people are giving to us their ideas on how to improve CFD post-processing and visualization.

This is pretty cool because version 1.0 came out in April or May 2009, version 2.0 came out in January 2010, version 2.1 came out with a streamlined GUI in March 2010 and already we are on 3.0 in July.

Please feel free to download the new version and tell us what you like and what you want to see next.

http://www.ensightcfd.com/download/download.html

One caveat: EnSight CFD 3 is no longer part of the EnSight installation. So you need to install it separately. That lets us release it on a more aggressive release schedule and not tie EnSight and EnSight CFD release schedules together.

Voting for the best Ideas comes to EnSight CFD

Today we added Ideas forum to EnSight CFD support forums.

When you submit an Idea to the forum, other members of the community can vote "Me Too" and acknowledge that your idea is a good one.

To motivate creation of good suggestions for how to improve EnSight CFD we are giving out highly desired and exclusive EnSight CFD coffee mugs to the suggestions which garner 3 votes by July 4, 2010.

Winner of Apple iPad from CEI announced

And the winner of the Apple iPad is Alex Rygg of Penn State University.

Congratulations Alex.

Alex's name was drawn at random from among those who attended the OpenFOAM Mid-Atlantic Users Conference. His iPad is still in shipping from Apple.

As a reminder there is a 2nd chance to win an Apple iPad. By submitting an image or animation to our image/animation contest. Also mentioned here. Contest entries accepted until the end of April.

Feature Request for EnSight CFD - Field Calculator

As people try out EnSight CFD they are noticing that it lacks the powerful variable calculator of EnSight.

EnSight CFD does have a calculator, we sometimes call it the "simple calculator", which is great for calculating a single value like the flow rate through a part. But the simple calculator can't compute a new variable field for you, something EnSight can do.

But never fear, EnSight CFD is getting this capability this summer in version 3.0. Its already in the works.

Want to win an iPad?

Show us your EnSight or EnSight CFD skills. Pay off for you could be a shiny new Apple iPad.

That's right, we are riding Apple's coattails and giving away an iPad, because:

- that's one of the best ways to motivate our users to send us images and animations and tell us how they are using EnSight.
- we are psyched to have a native Cocoa Mac version of EnSight CFD.
- we seem to have an unusually high percentage of Mac customers (not complaining).
- iPads are way cool

So if you don't already have access to EnSight or EnSight CFD go to our website and download the free version (registration required).

Contest details:
http://www.ensight.com/2010-april-image-contest.html

Contest submissions end on April 30, 2010.

EnSight CFD Academic Price Increase

All good things come to an end. As previously advertised, we plan to
discontinue $99 EnSight CFD at the end of this month, raising our price
for academic, nodelocked, leases from $99 to $199 for the foreseeable future (deadline
TBD).

Why are we doing a price increase? There's really a lot of good reasons....

EnSight CFD 2.1 will continue EnSight CFD's continuous improvements in polish to the look and feel,
more native to Windows and Apple platforms, making it very popular with
customers.

We never intended $99 to last forever, we believed that it was a good way
to start getting the word out a year ago when v1.0 was first released.
Since that time we've had many new customers adopt EnSight CFD,
some who have never before used EnSight but were long time
users of something else.

And at that time of first releasing v1.0 we
did not have a Free version available.

Finally since then we have
released four more versions: 1.1, 1.2, 2.0, and now 2.1. In that time, a
lot of improvement has gone in, including simple calculator, volume
rendering, session files, and native interfaces.

EnSight CFD will continue to be primarily a tool for the low end of the
market, it it not the goal to make it a competitor to EnSight Standard,
Gold, etc. by matching feature for feature. But rather to make it
attractive to the customer who never before considered CEI's software
products or thought they were only for the HPC user.

We are trying to tell all of our prospects for $99 version to buy before
the end of March in order to avoid the increased price. However we don't
believe that $100 more after April 1 is going to break anyone's bank
accounts.

If you haven't tried the software, now that EnSight CFD 2.1 is released, and before the price increase, there's never been a better time to try it.