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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

We are pleased to announce the release of EnSight CFD v2.1.

This version has the following improvements in the GUI.

1) New, Cleaner, Unified Toolbar
2) Native File > Open Dialogs (Mac users and Windows users will especially notice)
3) Improved GUI panels locking, tabbing, etc.
4) Unified several File Dialogs

1) The New Toolbar is improved in these ways
- It has fewer options and only the important ones are shown, making it easier to learn
- The view icons, which were frequently used were brought to the top, making them easier to find
- Unifying the icons on the toolbar for a better appearance
- Assumes that parts and variables panels will be used
- Consolidates several buttons under the Views menu
- Puts detailed panels such as Properties, Annotations, and Calculator on the right side

2) The Native Dialogs is improved in these ways
- File > Open now uses the Windows and Mac file navigation dialog making the search for your dataset much easier and more natural
- Printing, Colors, and other native dialogs used
- First you select the dataset to be opened. Then a separate dialog asks for details like the timestep, transient information, and other options.

3) The GUI panels are improved in these ways
- Less prone to move by accident
- Locking available and on by default to prevent them from moving
- Tabbing if you like to tab your panels
- These controls hidden by default, but easily accessed with a right-click

4) File > Open unifies several previous menus
File > Restore Session, File > Open handles sessions
File > Open can accept sessions, datasets, and images

Capabilities are pretty much the same as version 2.0.

So EnSight 2.1 does not introduce new capabilities. Its target was to make the current capabilities easier, more natural, and more pleasant to look at. Let us know if you like it.

There is still the free and paid versions of EnSight CFD.

CEI is announcing the release of EnSight CFD 2.0. It features volume rendering and session files and a Cocoa Mac version. CEI has also created a new website for EnSight CFD, www.ensightcfd.com.

But perhaps the most interesting addition to EnSight CFD 2.0 is a free version. The free version has some limits in file size (number of elements), doesn't read all the same data formats, and has a small watermark on the screen. But other than that, and lack of access to personal support, seems to be comparable to the paid version. See this comparison chart between EnSight CFD's free and paid versions.

CEI didn't have to make a free version to appeal to their current EnSight customer base since its possible to run EnSight CFD using a current installation and license of EnSight, for no additional cost. Its just a Window > Interfaces > EnSight CFD menu pick. EnSight CFD is not targeted to the current EnSight customers.

How does EnSight CFD compare to EnSight Lite or Standard or Gold?

EnSight CFD lags behind classic EnSight versions such as Lite, Standard, Gold, and DR in terms of high end features like batch mode, client-server, python scripting, command window, variable field calculator, keyframe animation and more. See this feature list. But according to the marketplace EnSight CFD is pretty comparable or beyond to other applications which have been at the lower level of capability to classic EnSight. And for the price of free it seems worth looking into.

It's clear that CEI is pursuing a strategy of serving the whole range of the CFD post-processing market from students and newbies to CFD with EnSight CFD priced at free to the high end with EnSight Gold and EnSight DR serving the supercomputing community at $10,000/year. And it seems that CEI has decided to make its free version of EnSight CFD as its lead marketing pitch. Maybe TV ads are not as cheap as has been reported in the news.

Well we are here at MacWorld in San Francisco. The number of exhibitors is down and Apple isn't here but that didn't hurt our experience. We had several customers visit the booth including some from NASA Ames, Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Naval Post-graduate School, Stanford, and Lawrence Livermore National Lab, Penguin Computing, and more. And a slew of interest in the Cocoa Mac version of EnSight CFD which was released last week.

What was also nice was a story about CEI and EnSight CFD, and my past life as a NASA Mac user, blogged up by "The Apple Core". Go check it out.