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They are running Altium on MAC?!
tooki:
--- Quote from: Psi on January 11, 2024, 10:57:00 pm ---For porting to iOS it would have been easier if they had left the code in Delphi rather than porting to C++, which they did many years back.
If they had stuck with Delphi longer all the cross compile stuff for Windows and iOS would have come out and with a little effort to update the win32 GUI stuff to firemonkey they could have had an version that will cross compile on Windows and iOS.
I assume they ported it to C because the pool of programmers to hire from is so much larger.
--- End quote ---
iOS ≠ macOS. I don’t think anyone wants Altium on iOS. (Delphi would compile to macOS, too, however.)
ejeffrey:
Far more likely they will continue to move in the direction of cloud hosting. It's certainly not what I prefer, but if you can play a first person shooter with streaming, even slightly effectively the technology is going to be good enough for altium. And it makes a lot of business sense for altium, it gets them cross platform support automatically, gives them more opportunities to extract money from customers, and largely side-steps the hellscape that is trying to keep your software running well on modern corporate windows desktops.
I've used the existing altium 365 viewer, and it's obviously quite limited and could be faster, but it actually works better than I expected for design reviews.
Even large companies are coming around to having policies that allow storing proprietary data in approved 3rd party cloud providers, as you can see from the success of products like OnShape and Autodesk Fusion. Of course there will be companies that can't or won't, and the desktop version isn't going to go away any time soon, but if you are hoping for Altium on the Mac the only way you will see it is in a browser.
hans:
I haven't run AD on a native Windows installation for over 6 years, all in VMs.. works fine. Win10 comes with DirectX software emulation APIs such that the DirectX version (older) Altium versions can be rendered without a GPU, inside the "VM client". I also tried Virtualbox 3D features, which is also a software emulation layer on the host side, but it didn't support Altium's crooked (older) DirectX version.. and I also think its abandonware at this point.
Software rendering does take quite a punch to the system though. I ran it on a 3900X system with as many cores allocated as I could get away with. Performance was OK with anti aliasing turned off and medium sized designs. However, I also found that a 5600G with only 6 cores can deliver acceptable performance, just. I have that CPU sitting in my NAS running Windows VMs, so that way I can remote into a CAD environment at anytime.
By todays standards both CPUs are not amazing multi-core performers anymore, so with that it should run on virtually any modern workstation. For folks that use older systems and want to use Mac or Linux, I feel your pain.
As in native support for Altium.. I wouldn't expect that in probably another half a dozen years. Besides electrical engineers often treating PCs as tools (rightly so), it also means that Mac's have a prejudgement of "useless" since so few tools work well on Mac. Ever tried LTspice's Mac version port? Yes I did, and although the primitives are the same.. the UI is not, and they clearly have stopped caring at some point as many useful UI dialogs are missing compared to the Windows versions.
However, since not many EEs use a Mac, this makes it a perfect chicken-egg problem. VMs are mainly just patches. To be honest I've stopped using Altium and swapped it for KiCad instead. For my projects its good enough.
Secondly, hearing the language/tools/developments woes of Altium doesn't convince me that they will quickly port over anytime soon. A large part stands by the UI framework chosen, and vendor lock-ins from language/tool environments doesn't help.
I honestly do think that if they (Altium) was to poll their customers for Linux support, that a considerable amount of people in the embedded space would probably vote in favor of a Linux port.
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