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Mathcad Prime 6.0 is out!

prop_design
15-Moonstone

Mathcad Prime 6.0 is out!

I see that Prime 6.0 has been released today. On the e-store I see either a full license or a student license. Maple offers a home use license, but it doesn't seem like Mathcad has that. Does anyone know for sure? Also, does Mathcad 15 come with Prime 6.0 purchase. The e-store doesn't say.

 

Based on all the forum posts, it looks like Prime 6 delivers a lot more than people expected. It seems to address a lot of the gripes. I'm curious what the new symbolic engine is. Is it home grown or licensed from someone. The Knitro solver is mentioned, but I think that's something different.

 

Thanks,

 

Anthony

59 REPLIES 59

Hi

From the store notes two home licences are available from one subscription

 

"To maximize your software investment, every PTC Mathcad Prime 6.0 license comes with one year of PTC Global Support, including two FREE additional PTC Mathcad license for home use (subscription only), allowing you to enjoy the freedom to work outside the office when needed."

 

Cheers

Terry

thanks for the reply. unfortunately, that seems more geared toward a corporate user who wants to work at home too. that's great, but doesn't apply to me. it looks like i'll have to use prime express. it would be nice if there was something for hobby use, like what maple offers. mathcad licensing seems to be either corporate or student, and i'm neither. i'm a retired aerospace engineer. so just using it at home. mostly for documentation for public domain software that i offer.

 

it's my understanding that you can download mathcad 15 if you have a license to prime. is that correct? there's nothing on the ptc estore, i'm basing this on forum posts i've read.

 

lastly, i first thought prime 6 improved the plotting. but the website is deceptive. it may be they are referring to old fixes they made, which people weren't happy with. so i'm not as sure as i was with my original post.

 

anthony

LucMeekes
23-Emerald III
(To:prop_design)

If you've never installed mathcad 15 before you can try that out for 30 days as well. The difference with Prime is that after 30 days mathcad 15 goes off, period. ( unless you throw money in).

Luc.

Can you provide a link to further information about the hobby aspect licensing of maple? Every time I asked them about this they said it was not possible. I tend to write a lot of code to interface with applications and would be interacted to explore maple. As an aside what are the plus deltas for you when it comes to maple vs mathcad?
mvenich
12-Amethyst
(To:tslewis)

 i'm a retired aerospace engineer. so just using it at home. mostly for documentation for public domain software that i offer.

 

PTC offered me a "retired" reduced rate of $300/year for a supposedly full license.

 

You might chase that.

LucMeekes
23-Emerald III
(To:prop_design)

for what i did, mathcad prime express was fine. i'm not doing anything complicated. just overlaying math onto pictures for documentation. i did some actual math with it but nothing complicated. also did math with mathcad 15 because i have used classic mathcad for a long time and find it more comfortable.

 

i think it's good they found an open source symbolic engine to use. trying to license things from competitors has got to be weird. but like you pointed out, it's a work in progress. i wonder if they will actually contribute their efforts back to the original open source software. or just horde everything they do. but at least it's not relying on maple or mathworks.

 

i think it would be good if ptc sold classic mathcad to maple and had them develop it and sell it. that way you'd get better math. the only thing is they need to keep it basically the same and able to import old mathcad files. i can care less about prime. if ptc continued selling it, i wouldn't buy it. i'd much rather have classic mathcad continue on.

 

i miss the old days when people posted files on the forum of mathsoft. that's how i learned mathcad, by studying peoples files. now it's just constant complaints about ptc. there is some help, but it's more like i have a problem help me. where as with the old mathsoft forum no one was complaining and people posted files for learning purposes. ptc has virtually killed mathcad. it's just all us old timers hoping something good will happen. the best thing would be if they sold it to maple, in my opinion.

 

like everyone here has said, we all have lots of old mathcad files and want to be able to open them. that's basically all i'm looking for at this point. i tolerate prime express because i have to, not because i want to. the e-store, the licensing, and the lack of any mention of classic mathcad are all concerning to me.

Does anybody know if there are any upgrade offers in the offing for upgrading to Prime 6?  I've been out of the loop for a while (illness) and would like to get back up to speed, but, now being retired, not at full licence price if I can avoid it.

 

Is Mathcad 15 (whatever) still included in the licence?

Stuart,

 

Welcome back!!

 

When I retired PTC offered a price of $300/year.  I expect you could get a similar offer.  Mathcad 15 is still part of the package.

Hi Fred.  Nice to see some familiar faces and thanks for the welcome. I had look at Prime 6.0 on the Alfasoft (ex Adept Scientific) product seminars held today.   I asked a number of questions with the answers implying the calculation side of things could still be improved.   Which is OK in its own little way, as it means most of my Prime and M15 worksheets should still run. 

 

I'm a bit stalled at the moment, though, as the only licenses I've got are for an old M14 and Prime 1.0, and the licences are still associated with a long-gone PC.

LucMeekes
23-Emerald III
(To:StuartBruff)

Welcome back Stuart,

 

You may know that you can install Prime 6 and use it for 30 days in full. After that it drops down to Prime 6 Express. That means you can open any Prime (1, 2, 3, 3.1, 4, 5 and 6) sheet and see any stored results, but 'Premium features' are disabled (which means that upon recalculation you may run into 'premium' messages). Premium features are such things as programming, symbolics, referenced sheets, and of course lots of functions such as bessel functions,  many graphics import and export functions and of course mean(), stdev() etc.

If you hadn't installed Mathcad 15 on your (new) PC you may be able to freely enjoy Mathcad 15 for a couple of weeks as well.

 

Luc

StuartBruff
23-Emerald II
(To:LucMeekes)

Thanks, Luc.  I'm keeping that option on hold at the moment.   I'm quite busy with some other projects and may delay getting Prime 6 for a few weeks, just so I've time devote to the programming  side (and other advanced features).

Hi Stuart,

a "welcome back" from me, too!

You may want to keep your MC14 license and let PTC support generate a license file for the machine you are currently using. Reason is that PTC does not sell perpetual licenses any more and so you will be forced to pay them year after year for having access to your IP.
Development of MC15 has stopped quite some time ago and you can only expect adoptions to OS changes and development of Prime is still glacially slow.

As Luc already wrote you may  want to test drive Prime 6 and Mathcad 15 to see if they, compared to your MC14, justify the annual fee asked for.

 

StuartBruff
23-Emerald II
(To:Werner_E)

Hi Werner,  I'll see what can be done, but apparently even my Prime 1 licence isn't' on the system (even though I can see it on my licence listing). 

 

I'm in the middle of setting up a new (for values of 'new')  iMac and MacBook, plus deciding which of two Lenovo Thinkpads I want to use as my main W10 laptop.   Once I've got the hardware sorted, I'll be in a better position to get restarted on installing Mathcad.

 

Cheers,

 

Stuart


Based on all the forum posts, it looks like Prime 6 delivers a lot more than people expected. It seems to address a lot of the gripes. I'm curious what the new symbolic engine is. Is it home grown or licensed from someone. The Knitro solver is mentioned, but I think that's something different.

Not sure what exactly you mean by "address a lot of the gripes". It was already told in another thread that we can expect a spell checker and custom margins in P6 - the interesting thing is that PTC seems to find it even worthwhile to mention those "features".  Both feature should be standard anyway and do not address the main points of criticism of Prime.

The highly praised numeric Knitro solvers from Artelys were implemented in Prime from the very beginning AFAIR. In actual work they  proved not much advantage over the formerly used implemented algorithms. In some cases (there are some forum threads about it) they performs even worse. While in old Mathcad you could chose among a couple of different algorithms and could change some parameters there, there is no such option in Prime - if it doesn't come to a solution there is no way you can tune it.

The real surprise about P6 is that there is a new symbolic engine. Haven't heard that PTC would work on that project. Its also unclear if its a PTC development or a third party software. Obviously PTC does not like to pay license fees to MathWorks for that age-old version of MuPad in the long run (MuPad in MatLab is much newer and more powerful and flexible). PTC seems to see it as a work in progress as the website states that the results may look different to what you are used to and that for the next few versions of Prime (= next few years ?) you have the option to switch back to Mupad for the symbolic calculations. Does not sound promising but we have to give it a test run someday to see whats it worth.


Does not sound promising but we have to give it a test run someday to see whats it worth.

Couldn't wait 😉 So here's the result of my first test of the new symbolic engine.

https://community.ptc.com/t5/PTC-Mathcad/Mathcad-Prime-6-0-Symbolic-Engine-based-on-Axiom-Fricas/m-p/629436/highlight/true#M187308

Nicholas
4-Participant
(To:Werner_E)

On the contrary, it sounds very promising.

https://www.ptc.com/en/products/mathcad/new-release 

 

  • Customization of margin dimensions, including headers and footers
  • Spellcheck available option and supports multiple languages
  • Add hyperlinks directly in worksheets
  • Expanded list of print options, and find/replace subscripts or individual parts of identifiers
  • 2D chart application options such as exporting plot as an image file
  • New symbolic calculation engine  

I guess a new symbolic engine is exciting.  Hope it's an improvement.  The rest.... what is this, 1995?

Werner_E
24-Ruby V
(To:DJF)


I guess a new symbolic engine is exciting.

Fully agreed on.

A new version of Mathcad with a modern new code base would be as exciting (and necessary), but PTC was not able or willing to provide a decent piece of software with comparable capability in more than 10 years.

Nonetheless - they made me curious and so I guess I will testdrive it next weekend.

 


Hope it's an improvement. 

Really!? OK, its said that hope dies last. I read that we will be able to switch back to the old symbolic engine (MuPad) for the next few versions of Prime. So it looks like PTC sees the new symbolic as a work in progress and thats not exactly trustworthy.
Does anybody know if the new symbolic is a third party software and who developed it? Given the mediocre 2D plot component which they obviously were not able to develop themselves I hardly can image they would be able to create a symbolic engine.

 


The rest.... what is this, 1995?

Well said. Look at it as a couple of bug fixes.

 

You've all missed (or I haven't seen) the big news:  2D plotting is now as good as Mathcad 15 was!  (Or is that still the add-in?

ValeryOchkov
24-Ruby IV
(To:DJF)

I have one spellchecker in Windows, Word, Excel, email, Facebook etc etc.

Why it cannot work in Mathcad?

My student can solve this problem!

 

I enlarge the image on the screen of my tablet everywhere. But not in Prime!

 

Raiko
16-Pearl
(To:DJF)

I wouldn't give it that harsh a judgement (...what is it 1995?) and say...1998?!

 

Raiko

LucMeekes
23-Emerald III
(To:prop_design)

Typical PTC:

 

On the download page for Prime 6 is a link to

" PTC Mathcad Prime 6.0 Platform Support and System Requirements document (PDF)"

Which gives you the requirements for Prime 5.0.0.0

Interesting!  When I downloaded it I got Prime 4,0

LucMeekes
23-Emerald III
(To:Fred_Kohlhepp)

Prime 6 (as well as Prime 5) only install on 64-bit Windows.

Is your windows 64-bit, or 32 ?

 

Luc

LucMeekes
23-Emerald III
(To:Fred_Kohlhepp)

Or have you only looked at the "Installation instructions"?

As is customary for PTC, this link gives you the installation instructions (a .PDF file) for Prime 4. That's the PTC way of doing things...right?

I installed (without looking at that pdf), and got Prime 6, but with a warning that Prime 5 is installed, and any of its links to other software will not work, or be replaced by Prime 6. 

 

Luc

LucMeekes
23-Emerald III
(To:prop_design)

Here's another one. It says: "Click Finish to exit the PTC Installation Assistant."

LM_20191003_Prime6.png

Clicking the dark green "Finish" field to the left does nothing.

I wonder if I should click the "Exit >" button at the lower right...

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