Author Topic: New CS videos  (Read 10986 times)

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Offline ahbushnellTopic starter

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Re: New CS videos
« Reply #25 on: January 06, 2018, 04:18:26 pm »
That was not nice of me. 

 

Offline Simon

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Re: New CS videos
« Reply #26 on: February 01, 2018, 02:13:43 pm »
is it me or is the differential pair video second to useless ? the written documentation is also pants, I have to look at the altium documentation to give me an incline
 

Offline ahbushnellTopic starter

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Re: New CS videos
« Reply #27 on: February 01, 2018, 02:16:20 pm »
is it me or is the differential pair video second to useless ? the written documentation is also pants, I have to look at the altium documentation to give me an incline
It can be painful sometimes figuring this stuff out.  But on the whole I like CS. 
 

Offline Simon

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Re: New CS videos
« Reply #28 on: February 01, 2018, 02:19:05 pm »
on the whole I like it, I can't wait to get going, but no one wnts to tell me how it works! to top it all Altium want to offer my AD with a 30% discount for £4850, my response was that if I can take CS as a standard of their software they can stuff it! apparently they are now working on even more expensive software whilst still not seeing that you need to get people through the door in the first place!
 

Offline Joel_l

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Re: New CS videos
« Reply #29 on: February 01, 2018, 03:21:23 pm »
I always found it humorous when Altium would call or email me trying to sell me an upgrade to designer. Let me see, I bought CS for <$500 with the potential or an on going $150 a year maintenance/ subscription fee. Why would there be any expectation that I would jump on 4-6K Designer plus $1800 a year subscription. It might happen for some, but I think Altium are very disconnected from reality.

As I've mentioned before ( over and over ), I find CS tolerable, but it's a shame I have the sense it's just a sales tool for Altium and not being supported. I think I have about 60 days left now on my subscription, my plan is to let it go. I see no signs of life for this product from Altium at this point.
 

Offline mars01

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Re: New CS videos
« Reply #30 on: February 02, 2018, 12:02:38 pm »
Joel, Altium have other priorities for now . Seems that Altium Designer 18 it's not quite finished yet and their efforts are focused there. They don't care so much about CS as they care for their flagship software.
Since most likely the same team that works on AD is working on CS, it's no wonder that CircuitStudio is on standby.

My guess is that they will try to release an update for CS just to fulfill an obligation but I will not expect something big.
Just have a a few obvious bugs solved, might add some menu buttons for functions that are already there (callable through the search field). An 1.4.2 update.

For me, it's not the first time that "I'm betting the wrong horse".
I mean, this is not a "bad horse" but a "slow horse"  :) For now, it's doing it's job and just that.
 

Offline Joel_l

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Re: New CS videos
« Reply #31 on: February 02, 2018, 02:16:42 pm »
Telling any customer base they are less important is never a good move. Altium promised a rev 2.0 by the end of 2016, so it's not like CS has only been ignored for a short while. The little update that did happen last year does not count for much.

Hopefully these are just your impressions ( unfortunately I agree with them and keep hoping I'm wrong ).
 

Offline Simon

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Re: New CS videos
« Reply #32 on: February 04, 2018, 05:51:30 pm »
Unfortunately Altium are as thick as shit. The person I spoke to on the phone who was responding to me filling out their form which offers Altium at a low cost for new start-ups told me that they are busy working on an even more expensive product. I tried to explain to her that if only Altium would just do a lower version of designer they would be able to offer it at lower prices and bring people through the door. She acknowledged that this is what they needed to do and that it is what they do plan to do but in years to come because they are focusing their attention on this very expensive product which is going to be even bigger than a designer. So try to reiterate to her that no one is going to use it unless they get them earlier and younger with a cheaper version of Altium designer or a version of circuit studio that is not a poor advert for Altium.

I suggested that she goes and finds days video if they want to know what is required but I'm sure they're not really interested. Clearly Altium is a company with multiple layers of management and the people at the top probably have no idea about the product they are selling. There probably people who just have product experience but no actual experience of electronics and electronics software.

I'm still waiting for a callback from he who would become my account manager to discuss this super duper discounted Altium designer for small start-ups.

Yes indeed the last update to circuit studio did absolutely nothing. It came very early on in me purchasing the product and am going to assume that it fixed a lot of the bugs that people were raving about in version 1. According to a chap at Farnell OU this year and update is due to be released which he told me when I complained about the lack of support for high resolution monitors. Perhaps that won't happen any more now that Altium top brass are interested in producing software that would cost tens of thousands of pounds which is great on paper until you find that nobody wants to buy your software because of the bad experience with your shitty and buggy cheap software.

It doesn't matter how little you are charging a customer, a customer should always be treated with respect by the brand. If you are going to offer something so cheap that it will not meet expectations then don't offer it at all. This is my philosophy because I don't intend any of our customers to go away thinking that my products don't work when in actual fact I appeased them by giving them low prices. And this is how software houses should work as well.
 

Offline Simon

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Re: New CS videos
« Reply #33 on: February 04, 2018, 06:39:45 pm »
Well what I have had from them sofar is that if you are a company that is less than three years old they will give you a heavily discounted price for out in designer for up to 3 years. After three years you have to pay the full price or perhaps something close to the full price. The problem I have is that if I start creating no end of libraries and designs in Altium designer and my company does not take off to the point where I can afford software that cost £5000 what happens to all of my designs and libraries I have created. Do I effectively lose access to them? Would they working circuit studio?
 

Offline jc101

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Re: New CS videos
« Reply #34 on: February 12, 2018, 09:37:01 pm »
Well what I have had from them sofar is that if you are a company that is less than three years old they will give you a heavily discounted price for out in designer for up to 3 years. After three years you have to pay the full price or perhaps something close to the full price. The problem I have is that if I start creating no end of libraries and designs in Altium designer and my company does not take off to the point where I can afford software that cost £5000 what happens to all of my designs and libraries I have created. Do I effectively lose access to them? Would they working circuit studio?

There is a StartUp scheme running, if your company is under 7 years old.  Essentially you can get a Full AD licence for under £4k time limited to 3 years (inc maintenance for the 3 years in that price too), after that it just stops.  You can then either buy an AD licence, or you could save everything in a format suitable for CS and go back to that.  What is handy is it seems the price you paid for for the StartUp licence is fully credited against the cost of the AD licence.  There is a 1 year version too for less than the annual AD sub. 

That doesn't seem bad for 3 years access to the full AD product, the aim I understand is that you have built up business enough to then move to the standard AD offering (perpetual licence and annual sub).  The "risk" is that will CS be around in 3 years, and can you can export in such a way that CS can read the AD files - currently that is possible by saving in older formats within AD, but in the future... food for thought.
 

Offline Simon

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Re: New CS videos
« Reply #35 on: February 12, 2018, 09:42:51 pm »
Well they obviously can't be bothered to deal with me because I'm still waiting for the call. To be honest I'm totally unimpressed with Altium and I do not wish to spend any further money. I have had the product for nearly a year now and I'm still waiting for that next major update which hopefully will fix a lot of the bugs. As far as I am concerned they should be given the same attention to every software they produce and therefore I take the quality of circuit studio is a representation of the quality of Altium designer. And I have now intention of throwing any more money at Altium until they pull their fingers out of their arses. It does seem indeed that Dave cynical view of them is highly accurate as at the moment they are chasing around trying to earn even more money by producing an even more expensive software than designer yet they can't even keep a proxy little program that studio working properly. The cost of circuit studio is as much money as I will begrudge them until they fix it. Unless of course they can make me a really good offer but somehow I doubt it because they are only in it for the money to the point that the product and the customer suffers.
 
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