This is a very sad situation. It shows that PTC are a completely arrogant corporation, don't talk to or respect their end users needs. PTC think they know better than them. I do not put myself in the class of yourself or many other users on this forum but PTC somehow has to humble itself and realise that there are more Doctors and Professors using Mathcad who are active on the forum than one would find in most universities. Their users are people doing important research and solving real world problems for their communities and elsewhere by using Mathcad software. These users need to be able to do those things efficiently and not find that PTC cannot leave well enough alone and have broken the very tool that they rely on. As I have said before the only thing that Mathcad 15 really needed is better unit handling. In my view the second most important thing is the ability of the software to generate a proffessional report or journal paper. If I where PTC I would have left Mathcad alone and concentrated on another product that could reliably take Mathcad output so that it could be easily formatted into a scientific paper. They could have sold this as an addon to Mathcad thereby increasing their revenue. They are quickly loosing that opportunity as Wolfram's computable document (CDF) format becomes dominate in the market.

I'll be waiting for Prime 4, hoping that is a superset of mathcad 15, and not a subset... Meanwhile all the "Prime" versions are useless to me.

All features from Mathcad 15 should be able to run in Prime 5, and a file converter should be able to read files created under mathcad 15 and convert them to a file readable by Prime 5, with all the features...

Also , Mathcad Prime should run at same speed as Mathcad 15 ( I have some large simulations running several hours, and I don't want the durations to increase)

To get this implemented in MC15 would require a major rewrite again ti re-implement dynamic unit chacking, which is what they did for Prime.

Would a re-write as you mentioned have been achieved in a much shorter time than re-writing the whole UI as they have with Prime?

In any case PRIME is worth nothing without PERFECT CONVERTER of old files !!!!!!!!!!! I WILL NEVER USE PRIME WITHOUT A REAL CONVERTER !!!!!!!

How can you expect a perfect converter given that Prime is missing so many features of Mathcad 15?

And then - a converter shouldn't be necessary (at least not on the user side) as one would expect that Prime is simply able to read and write files in the older formats.

Fingers crossed the convertor will be improved in Prime 4.0

James Lamb wrote: MC15 is still a 32-bit program, of course, but I would not have thought it would be such a big task to convert it to 64-bit.

PTC will be adding support for Windows 8.1 operating system in the Prime 3.1 and 15.0 M040.

I would hesitate to say that PTC should revert to 'Classic' MC, but they really need toeither do that or move Prime ahead by including all tha capabilities of MC15 and adding value in the form of easier interface, more computation power, better graphing, etc.

There are many features still missing from Prime but there is no chance of ever going back, we need to move forward. Hopefully with the delayed release of Prime 4.0 it will be much closer to where we want it to be.

Felix Perez wrote: I think It is about perspective too. For me is better to use Prime than Mathcad 15. It was easier for my investigations and for my students too. You can easily combine with other programs and that is helpful for my company of structural engineering too. What I see with my researchers colleagues is that if they are doing what they have always done they will hate prime. But if they are improving in other new technological areas they will love prime. Maybe PTC is not thinking in old users but maybe in the new ones.  Like Microsoft, Autodesk and other software companies do. And I think we are the ones who always have to improve ourselves and use the new technologies, because It doesn't matter how many titles we have. If we cannot use the new technologies we will be forgotten.

Unfortunately for your argument, Prime is *not* an improvement over Mathcad 15 - it lacks many of the features that Mathcad 15 provides and that many engineers find necessary or highly desirable for doing their jobs.   For example, Prime is almost totally unsuited for image manipulation, as there is no means to make changes to an image that are automatically reflected in the worksheet.  In M15, all I had to do was apply a transform to an image and then look at it in an Image Component.  In Prime, one has to write the image to file and then *manually* load that file *every single time* a change is made to the image - this is impractical to say the least. In addition, the UI response is very slow and I frequently found myself thinking I could have counted up to infinity and back before Prime actually displayed a result.  For reasons such as this, a significant number of engineers will not use Prime unless circumstances dictate that they have to.   It simply doesn't do the job.   I'd "improved" myself beyond Primes's current level of capability many years ago.

Which is a pity, as there are some nice features in Prime - particularly the removal of static type checking and the ability to mix units in arrays.   Hopefully, Prime 4.0 will give sufficient improvement that I will make more use of Prime.  Otherwise, I shall stick to M15 as my development tool of choice.

Stuart

Albert Schepers wrote: This topic started April 2014.  Two and a half years later there is still no Prime 4.0 or improvements to MathCAD 15.  I understand they are coming but apparently they were announced in 2014.  My issue is that neither works on Windows 10 without difficulty, try to get it running, I did and the PTC techs had not been informed about how to load Net Framework 3.5 , required for MAthcad.  Also with both loaded on the computer Prime will not convert from Mathcad in Windows 10. This is not about Ribbons or functionality it is simply about keeping it current.  This is a great program, I have used it from about version 1, but it is languishing and it appears there is no interest in improving or updating. A

Oddly,  I didn't have any problems getting Mathcad 15 and Prime 3.1 running on two Windows 10 laptops, nor did I have any problems converting *mcd* programs to Prime.

Unfortunately, Mathcad has been functionally languishing for many years.   Not only is it missing many features that most (if not all) of it major competitors have but it doesn't even provide adequate support for many of the features it does have (eg, simplified indexing and information functions for nested arrays, automation of animation (missing from Prime altogether) and programmatic control of plots (M15 allows some access to the 3D plot via a Component, but not all of the potential interfaces are exposed, and this is not a "Mathcad feature" as such but is probably a serendipitous oversight - it's certainly not documented!).

To make Mathcad a truly serious contender in the market, PTC need to deploy more resources to push Prime more rapidly along its development path and to add the features that would make it a Proper 21st Century mathematical application.

Stuart