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| [Banter] What is the worst software you have used for its price? |
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| RedLion:
We all have a software that we like to hate. What is yours? At my new job, we use Mentor Xpedition for PCB design, which I am told costs cool 6 figures on the free market, and the user interface is absolutely horrifying. I am genuinely baffled at just how bad it is, coming from an Altium background, which is less than 10% of the price! (granted that UI is not perfect either) I wonder how you arrive at the decision to buy such an expensive piece of bloatware that looks and feels like it was designed by some hobbyist for DOS, it is dog slow and clunky, and if you want to, say, turn your schematic into a PCB, you have to open another program, which is even slower, and has an even worse UI. I mean, if freeware is a bit crap, you deal with it, because it's free, but why is anyone spending that much money on that bad of a software? |
| jogri:
Probably Keithleys KickStart software, they charge over 1.000 € for it and it's actually hilarious how bad that software is: They sell dataloggers for 2-5k, but the software (that you have to buy extra) can't even take a measurement every second without drifting like crazy. You can only specify the amount of time between measurements, but the time it takes to take a measurement randomly fluctuates by like 10-20 milliseconds. If you want to take a measurement every second you have to specify a delay of ~850 ms between measurements since a single measurement takes roughly 150 ms and then fine tune that delay and just pray that the timing works out somehow (it will not). The 20 year old free HP software on the other hand is perfect: You just tell it that you want a measurement every second and it times it perfectly down to a fraction of a ms. |
| RedLion:
--- Quote from: jogri on May 19, 2022, 12:53:29 pm ---Probably Keithleys KickStart software, they charge over 1.000 € for it and it's actually hilarious how bad that software is: They sell dataloggers for 2-5k, but the software (that you have to buy extra) can't even take a measurement every second without drifting like crazy. You can only specify the amount of time between measurements, but the time it takes to take a measurement randomly fluctuates by like 10-20 milliseconds. If you want to take a measurement every second you have to specify a delay of ~850 ms between measurements since a single measurement takes roughly 150 ms and then fine tune that delay and just pray that the timing works out somehow (it will not). The 20 year old free HP software on the other hand is perfect: You just tell it that you want a measurement every second and it times it perfectly down to a fraction of a ms. --- End quote --- Wow, that sounds like it runs on bootlegged LabView |
| VK3DRB:
iTunes. Even being free, it is way overpriced. |
| KaneTW:
--- Quote from: RedLion on May 19, 2022, 12:31:54 pm ---We all have a software that we like to hate. What is yours? At my new job, we use Mentor Xpedition for PCB design, which I am told costs cool 6 figures on the free market, and the user interface is absolutely horrifying. I am genuinely baffled at just how bad it is, coming from an Altium background, which is less than 10% of the price! (granted that UI is not perfect either) I wonder how you arrive at the decision to buy such an expensive piece of bloatware that looks and feels like it was designed by some hobbyist for DOS, it is dog slow and clunky, and if you want to, say, turn your schematic into a PCB, you have to open another program, which is even slower, and has an even worse UI. I mean, if freeware is a bit crap, you deal with it, because it's free, but why is anyone spending that much money on that bad of a software? --- End quote --- The user interface is a relic of the past, as with a lot of software. The main strength of Xpedition lies in its rules engine, simulation capabilities, and team support. I work on pretty high speed designs. As I work alone, Altium is my preferred choice because there's just too much auxillary work to be done in Xpedition. But all the vendors expect Xpedition/Cadence/Zuken and sometimes you run into things that Altium's rules engine doesn't support well and it's annoying. |
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