I have found that Mathcad Prime 1.0 Beta is very far from what I would call a Beta stage. I would not even call it an Alpha.
I have read through the posts and have nothing new to add in terms of bugs and issues. I will say that none of my Mathcad 14 worksheets so far has ported into Prime correctly. And most of them crashed with an error message in a pop-up box. I could not copy and paste an image into the worksheet (which is a way that I use to import supporting figures and text and has been a very nice feature of Mathcad 14). I use Mathcad with powerpoint and paint a lot, so being able to grab a graph and even a group of regions and then paste them as an image into presentations (and back into Mathcad) or convert them from one image format to another is absolutely crucial for documentation and knowledge management.
I would have to say please don't release this - it has a lot of work to go. If it breaks with backward compatibility this much, I think it is going to devastate the Mathcad customer base permanently. If you do release it, I would call it "MathTab" or something like that and would keep it separate and well away from the Mathcad 14 workhorse. If it gets to the point where it is truely functioning as a superior (and backward compatible alternative) to Mathcad 14, only then would I would change the name to Mathcad Prime or Mathcad 15 or whatever. If it gets the Mathcad name, it had got to be a real improvement or be at least as good.
I was beginning to learn the automation API so that I could program new Mathcad Applications. (I have done some basic work also in VBScript and VB.Net). My goal was to develop new Mathcad applications to extend the Mathcad 14 platform - to do things that enhance the user base and applications space for Mathcad. If programming interfaces are not supported (both Mathcad's internal one as well as external hooks), then I will have lost a lot of invested time and effort. I would have to permanently abandon any current and future efforts to extend Mathcad, if those options are not made present.
Let's take this from a different point of view. What is PTC-Mathcad attempting to achieve with Prime? Can they enlighten us as to what is motivating such a large change? Is it operating system obsolescence (Mathcad has has seen the world pass through a number of operating systems: Windows 3.1, 95, 98, 2000, NT, Me, etc. and coding languages from C, C++, C#, VB, *.Net, COM, VBscript, html, xml...). Is it that the code that has been ported through 20 years of OS and programming language changes needs to be redone in order to be poised/compatible for the future? Is it that major changes are needed in order to integrate with the other PTC products?
Each of us Beta-testers has more than just a help-us-find-the-bugs user-interface input to give to PTC regarding what Mathcad is, what the vision of the future of the Mathcad product might be and how we might want to see it grow. But we can't help PTC unless we get some idea of the issues that they are dealing with and why they are proceeding in a particular direction. Can we know what that is? Please let us know more so that we can help make PTC Mathcad a better product and extend its customer base. Mathcad is absolutely the right GUI concept for the future. That I have no doubt. But it does need some TLC to get there, and handling it too roughly might just kill it off.
Norm Fontaine
Gneiss Software
