What is Altium's plan to clean up the product ? AD 17.1.9 was OK ...AD18, is widely believed to be defective software.
1) Bug crunch is up to 2506 items. Even if 50% of those are real, that's alot of unanswered posts.
-Altium you are supposed to be taking note and interfacing with the users, not just letting BugCrunch count to infinity !.
2) Altium claims on their website they are putting on 6000 new users per year.
-Is the business strategy to ignore existing users, not fix the software not bother about the say, lost 1000 subs per year of disgruntled users ?
It reminds me of a business strategy used for Health Clubs and Gyms. Just keep adding members that never use the facilities, and never maintain the facilities..
I talk to the sales people who are sympathetic to my complaints but have no input or control it seems.
The biggest disagreement I hear privately among many is that Altium want to penalise / charge users for ignoring paying subs for AD18, which users consider is defective software. There is plenty of grounds for it being considered defective software- Look at the Gerber disaster !
I considered organising a boycott of paying subs and bringing in the ACCC, but if Altium's business strategy is just to bank on adding new users and ignoring the unhappy ones, I do not think not paying subs is going to work, it will be within their strategy. They won't care.
There are a couple of options :
1) You can try and do a deal with Altium to avoid paying for the defective AD18 release. That might work, depending on your history with the product., and how long you have been out of maintenance.
2) Just stay on AD 17.1.9 for 4 years which is about the time to re coup buying Altium from new in 4 or 5 years time. When it might be fixed.
Yea - they threw their long time users under a bus in order to attract Allegro and Pads users.
Some recent posts I made on their forum follows. I used AD 6.9 for years. I'm sticking with AD 17 for now, tho I'm current with them.
Here's the posts - this was concerning the silly Properties panel that replaced modal dialog boxes:
>>>>>
Just bring back an option to use modal dialogs.
Allegro sucks because of property panels. If you are trying to court allegro users at large companies - good luck with that. They get full seats of Cadence PCB and schematic for free along with the IC design tools that cost millions.
You're throwing your long time users under a bus. Not cool... These are people that need to know that they are turning valid hardware. Changing a methodology to fit some newfangled GUI isn't like changing things in some software dev environment. We just can't backspace, backspace, correct. ourselves out of it.
Maybe it's due to Altium being run by marketing and software guys... you need to realize - we hardware guys get to hit compile once and wait to see if it works.
That's the key - real PCB's in our hands. Not pretty PDF's, or fancy 3D - boards that are in our hands. We and our clients aren't Lucasfilms - we don't make money on pretty pictures...
And make the layer stack table that you place on the artwork have selectable columns so I can get rid of thickness and constant. We're at 62 CAMHOLDs from various PCB fabs due to that.
And don't say "use Draughtsman" since our fabs don't even look at PDF's except for the purchase order.
And trying to have a materials thing in AD19 for PCB lamination. Really? Not one of our PCB fabs will follow that - esp on controlled impedance. They have tools they use and specific laminates and prepreg for stuff we need controlled. Having some PCB designer that's never in his life actually worked on a PCB fab line, let alone one specific to a certain PCB fabricators line dictate best practice for a PCB fabricator is silly at best - disastrous at worst.
And for non-stackup critical quick turns and small on-shore runs - which most of us are doing - it's fodder for more CAMHOLDS.
And 360? So you expect that all of our disparate vendors are going to rush out and get 360? Really? Tell you what - go visit a CM or fab during an ISO or AS9100 audit. See how that goes (they won't even let you in the door). Their documentation and workflow is well beyond a cursory thing Altium would provide.
Me thinks Altium needs to get all the employees to actually run multiple products thru from concept to delivery. Deal with purchasing. Deal with bid processes. Deal with clients. Deal with fabricators. Deal with CM's. Deal with things like DFARS requirements Deal with ITAR Deal with counterfeit parts mitigation You will see real quick what's important and what's fluff or in most cases useless.
Reality - it sucks...
<<<<<
So someone mentions that the workspace stays live with the Prop panel vs. modal dialogs of old:
>>>>
Yea - but I used the inspector, PCB panel, and PCB/SCH/Lib LIsts for stuff like that. There's times when I just want to quickly change a property. Simple double click, open a modal and move on.
I still don't see why they did this with some panel flailing away with every thing I do. Really distracting. I still think it was to woo the allegro crowd.
When I saw the dims in the PCB lib thing it sort of confirmed that to me. IF I have a super critical footprint I need to make, I use a real 3D tool and bring in a 2D view with "L" shaped sketch elements that I can lock pads and such to. (NOTE - Dennis - got the patent pending on that...)
What would be nice would be various object snaps like center, intersection, etc... Even Soildworks (not a misspell) had to add OSNAPS back in 2004 I think.
I always thought it odd that I can draw a 1:50 residential site plan CAD drawing more accurately than a PCB. Ya know - that's what Altium should be concerned with... real improvements. So many others like that...
Here's one example - Imagine being able to use a command like thing to draw an exact trace or line length and width. Or maybe one driven by dims...
Back in 1995 when I first got Soiledworks the one thing that was different was that you sketched rough and drove the the sketch with dims. In Acad, you'd place and draw geometry and the dims were driven by that.
There's times when both are nice to have. There's times when I really prefer Soildworks way of doing it - I use that a lot for doing footprints and rec'd layout for hi-output LED's - BTW - there's a real lacking of support in most EDA tools for the way Nichia, Luxeon, etc... want those to be done. I've done well ove a few hundred different designs for a guy here in DC that does a lot of that. Weird is that before I got "assigned" him by one of my CAD guys, I did a ring light for this thing:
https://youtu.be/V75m79nsBTM?t=203You'll see the thing light up in the demo for Obama...
Back in the day I did a 40 mile to scale 3D site plan of a tower farm- no mouse or digitizer
http://ajawamnet.com/ajawam4/trans.dwgAll command line and cursor keys, on a DOS machine running ACAD 10 I think.
Having more flexibility in creating geometry would be a lot nicer than some silly bells and whistles and chasing marketturds...
<<<<