Who is the target user?

[SM1]

Following is a copy (with some minor modification)of text I sent to PTC and felt strongly to share with the user community.

"I have been testing Mathcad Prime for couple of days now. I am not sure who this program is intended for. It does not seem any of Mathcad 14 user will upgrade to Mathcad Prime as many advanced features of Mathcad 14 are not available in Prime. Also, many features in Mathcad that were improved over many years and versions are lost in Matchcad Prime. A typical example is textbox. The implementation of textbox in Mathcad in the current version with implied textbox (converts to textbox if you type space after word), self expanding textbox, moving out of the textbox etc, is far superior to Mathcad Prime. There is neither support for reference files nor support for objects like Excel except for importing Excel data as table. Many awkwardness of user interface that were somewhat improved over the years seems to be back. Keyboard shortcuts for many of commands are still missing and many commands that had keyboard shortcut are gone (e.g. only way to enter matrix is through ribbon. Still trying to figure out how to insert or delete an element in matrix) Header and Footer is much improvement. However, seem to lack of proper implementation of multiline text. There is no ruler and user defined tab support in math or text. And of course, no support for programing till Prime 2.0.

It will be much easier to comment on the program if we knew what you are trying to achieve with this program as this cannot be obviously an upgrade to Mathcad 14."

SM

[PhilipLeitch]

I think you are right. I said similar things (that it would be of little use to me without programming and symbolics). Everyone who feels this way should let them know. Otherwise I'd just switch to Maple.

To me it's like Windows XP and Windows Vista (first release). Going form XP to Visa was a bit of a journy. There were "some" compatibilities so that many programs ran well, and other programs could be tweaked or "emulated" in such a way as they ran. But across the board all programs seemed to run less optimally, there were a broad range of new bugs and none of my key peripherals worked at all. In the end I considered that Vista was not an upgrade to XP and hence our company still buys XP on new computers and instead will move to Windows 7.

BUT Vista was a new OS, and it gave a completely different look and feel. It ran differently and had different features, some of which are really handy. It wasn't worth "upgrading" - but it was a constructive step.

Similarly Prime is an entirely new environment, that doesn't seem very compatibile with previous versions and many of my key components "just won't work". At this stage Prime 1.0 won't have the key components I need, and therefore I don't consider it an upgrade either. But Prime does seem to be a constructive step.

Keep in mind this is in Beta, and it seems we are all in agreement on many of the major flaws and holes. May of the much touted features of Vista have already been removed due to complaints of users. So let's assume the same is true for Prime and just keep streaming the views through to them.

Philip
___________________
Nobody can hear you scream in Euclidean space.

[LarryLederer-di]

On 8/18/2009 1:40:24 PM, SatishMatani wrote:
>"I have been testing Mathcad
>Prime for couple of days now.
>I am not sure who this program
>is intended for.

Good point. I have been involved with trying to port a Cold Fusion (XML)application to .NET. Which is similar to what I believe I PTC trying to do. Even though the Cold Fusion application was mature trying to replicate the functionality in .NET was a real challenge. I'm not a professional programmer so I was not clear on the technical problems, but the professional .Net programmers we used were stymied after getting about 50% of functional replicated.

[StuartBruff]

On 8/18/2009 1:40:24 PM, SatishMatani wrote:
== Keep in mind this is in Beta, and it seems we are all in agreement on many of the major flaws and holes. May of the much touted features of Vista have already been removed due to complaints of users. So let's assume the same is true for Prime and just keep streaming the views through to them.

There is a potentially big problem with assumptions of that nature. The target audience for Mathcad would appear to cover a much wider range of user capability than perhaps several of us would assume.

Some of the changes have been introduced to remove or simplify features that a substantial number of users have found confusing or difficult to understand.

In itself this is not necessarily a bad thing, except that there is often no replacement feature or workaround for the capability. SUC is the most notorious example of this, which arose out of a need to stop people getting dimensionally inconsistent results and prevented a significant number of very useful worksheets from working.

In addition, some features have been omitted/restricted because 'somebody' couldn't see why 'anybody would want to do xxx' (1)

Recursion is an example of this, where an arbitrary upper limit on recursion depth was introduced because some users had problems with poorly terminated recursive structures. The limit broke several of my worksheets, which just happened to exceed that limit.

Now whilst such considerations may protect one group of users from harm, they do considerable harm to those who perhaps have different needs or are less confused by the original feature.

The danger is that Spirit will be targetted at users who have difficulty getting to grips with the more esoteric aspects of Mathcad (2) ... don't forget they'll be complaining too, but about things several people on this forum might be slavering in anticipation of.

Stuart

(1) I have difficulty getting to grips with this view as a principle, as I can often think of some 'interesting' reason why I'd like to do xxx or take advantage of a side-effect of xxx - and I'm pretty sure that even I can't, somebody else usually will.

(2) ... Anybody tried to enter or load a global variable in Spirit?

[IRstuff]

There are no global variables in Spirit. Importation of M14 sheets with globals result in bitmaps.


TTFN,
Eden

[CarlosVillaseño]

I agree with the first message (Who is the target user?); I'm disappointed with the drastic reduction of Marhcad functionality on the Prime 1.0 edition. I don't understand which the target is. If the final version doesn't include the features like components, programming, controls, etc., I really prefer to keep working with Mathcad 14. Mathcad Prime 1.0 at this time doesn't represent an option to upgrade. How can this software to compete itself when it will offer less features than the previous version? How PTC will say to the users "hey! now we offering you a new version but its power do fewer things than your current version...! :-((" I'm sure that the answer will be "no way!"
Mathcad 14 has no limits, only the user creativity is the limit.
If PTC intent to sell the missing features separately, why not reincorporate the missing features in Prime 1.0 for more cost? The software is worth. As user I can wait more time expecting nothing less than software with awesome improvements in the existing features. If more cost is not the target I think that PTC is making a mistake because many users will reject the upgrade.

Carlos Villase�or

[StuartBruff]

On 8/19/2009 4:11:42 PM, cvmdiseno0001 wrote:
== Mathcad 14 has no limits, only the user
creativity is the limit

Not true, except by creatively using other
languages to create components or dlls to extend
Mathcad. There are other things where creativity
can indeed get round problems, but the effort
involved in doing so is high.

M14 has several severe restrictions in its
capability, such as static type checking (known as
SUC on this forum) that prevent constructs such as
s:=stack being used to abbreviate stack (*) and a
whole host of other things that M11 did quite
happily. There are a lot of features that are
antiquated (such as animation) or missing (eg,
multiple windows onto a single worksheet. see http://collab.mathsoft.com/read?102673,12 for a
list of some feature requests.

(*)(happily, this now reverts to M11 behaviour in
Spirit).

[TedDiehl,PhD]

Based on what you all see in Prime 1 Beta - do you think the released version will be much better?

Will ANY of you switch from MC 11 or MC14 to Prime?

2-D graphing is weak, abilities to read MC 11 docs (.mcd) is ZERO. Ability to read .xmcd docs is very limited (much of the document's formating is ignored, images are lost, calculations often do not work, ...). Graphing large data sets (over 10,000 rows) does NOT work. You cannot save Prime file back to MC14, ...

Based on what I see and cannot imagine that by Prime 2.0 PTC could put back the programming, Excel components, buttons, user DLLs, scripting, collapsed regions, dcoument referencing, and other important features, along with fix all the current BASIC features which have been severly damaged in Prime 1.0 Beta.

Do other's think differently?

I do not intend to be harsh - but I am severely disappointed and extrmely frustrated.

I believe that many Mathcad users, corporate and Acedemic, will view Prime as the death of Mathcad. They are already learly of PTC (thinking they are trying to turn Mathcad into a Pro/E tool) and now they wait 2+ years for software that does far less than Mathcad 14 or any version in my memory. The few new feautres of Prime are far outwieghed by all the missing stuff and weak implimentation (i.e. 2-D graphs).

Again - I am Mathcad's biggest advocate. Can someone show me the light?

Ted Diehl

[StuartBruff]

On 8/23/2009 2:14:35 PM, diehlted wrote:
== Again - I am Mathcad's biggest advocate. Can
someone show me the light?

[RichardJ]

I don't know if I should be ROTFL or ROTFC.

Richard

[StuartBruff]

On 8/23/2009 2:14:35 PM, diehlted wrote:
== Again - I am Mathcad's biggest advocate. Can
someone show me the light?

Joking aside (well I hope it was joking), as has
been mentioned previously, the dreaded SUC has
weakened its grip upon the neck of Mathcad. So
this augers well for bringing back some worksheets
that have so far existed only in their M11
incarnation.

As a taster, see the attached M11 = :-), M14 = :-
(, Spirit 1 = 🙂

I can now raise a quantity to the power of a
variable, assign variable argument length
functions to another name, and select whether an
argument to a function should behave as a function
or variable.

In addition, we finally have mixed quantities in a
an array ... hoorah!

... although I'm not sure about raising a quantity
to the power of another quantity 😕

Perhaps it might be worth comparing Spirit to an
earlier, program-less version of Mathcad (6?).
Although the lack of symbolics and programming is
a major handicap, it's still possible to do some
useful stuff.

Stuart

[PhilipOakley]

I suspect that there is something that the PTC
test team forgot to tell us. Not in any sort of malicious or conspiratorial manner, just plain
cock-up.

I suspect that they already knew that this BETA release only contained limited functionality, but
hadn't realized that the list they released didn't
tell us, the real world guinea pig testers, how
limited it was.

BUT that there is something at the core that they
do want proper test and opinion on. Unfortunately
we are too busy fighting the crocodiles to drain
the swamp, or is it the other way round, we can't
tell, which is part of the problem ...

It may even be that they have a schedule driven
release of Beta testing, so this first one wan't
as far advanced as they had expected, and there
will be a next release, again with features as
available, etc.

So far testing has been a bit of a train wreck.

Philip Oakley

[TedDiehl,PhD]

Perhaps we could get an official answer from the PTC Beta team - how many Beta cycles are you planning for Prime 1.0.

As Phillip relays (and I concur), so much is missing, I cannot tell what is a bug, an omission, or a feature!

Ted