News of a new Mathcad – Mathcad Prime?
Update (10th Feb 2010): There is an update to this post here.
I received a lot of feedback from my recent post Is Mathcad Dying? and, thanks to a couple of readers, I have learned of some new (new to me at least) information sources concerning this product and they all point to a major new mathematical product coming from PTC called Mathcad Prime.
The first ‘new’ Mathcad information source is the blog, Engineering with Mathcad, and its associated Twitter feed. I am not sure if this blog is official or not because all of the posts are currently anonymous but the author(s) seems to know what is going on in the Mathcad world and it is well worth a look.
The second is another blog, simply called Mathcad, which is written by the Mathcad product management team. It’s only been going since the beginning of the month but there are already some interesting posts there including The right tool for the job and Mathcad and Knovel Math.
So it looks like PTC DO have something up their sleeve in the form of a new product called Mathcad Prime. Until very recently I hadn’t heard of it and I am yet to see some screenshots, videos or demos myself but it was apparently demonstrated at a PTC user conference recently. Google seems to know very little about it at the moment though.
Perhaps news of Mathcad’s death has been greatly exaggerated! Does anyone out there know more about this product?
From recent MathCAD vendor newsletters here in New Zealand:
MATHCAD PRIME 1.0
Mathcad Prime 1.0 has a redesigned and focused interface. It produces a new design, look and feel, and improves the learnability and useability of Mathcad.
The traditional Mathcad is a desktop tool that focuses on maths exploration and misses the strong communication and collaboration activities and capabilities. This results in highly skilled engineers spending too much of their time preparing, creating and editing worksheets. The solution to overcome this is to create design documents and focus on engineering to generate better productivity and efficiency. This creates complex, highly professional engineering design documents, such as readable math, texts, images, plots, matrices and tables, quickly and easily.
There is over 600 functions in the Engineering Unit Support system for the manipulation, display, analysis and plotting of data.
Mathcad Prime better aligns with customers initiatives. Less time is spent on documenting and more time is spent engineering. The newly improved useability and learnability creates rapid returns on investments and allows the reuse and leverage of content throughout the organization, helping capture intellectual property from the retiring workforce.
Primary capabilities of Mathcad Prime are:
Task-based, Fluent user interface
Document-focus, engineering notebook feel
Headers and footers, WYSIWYG editing
Units handling throughout, dynamic unit checking
Labels to distinguish units, constants, functions, etc
Improved, intuitive equation editing
Solve blocks as true “containers”
New and improved matrix operations
DoE, with new functions and plot types
Improved error messaging & tracing
Simplified 2D plots
Direct XPS and PDF publishing
Improved Pro/E-integration usability
Integration with Windchill and ProductPoint
Simplified licensing
Thanks for that Greg
If there is no programming or symbolic engine then its a giant leap backwards!
If that is indeed the case, as I see indicatd on other Mathcad blogs, MathCad 14 will be my last version.
I was no fan of the MatchCad programming “style or syntax” but having it was better then not having it. I found it useful but hard to use, I would like to see the capability be retained and improved.
If there is no symbolic solving capability MathCad loses almost all of its usefulness to me!
Dave – I would hold off saying what is and isn’t in it until it is released. It is my understanding that the product isn’t being deployed until more features are added. I agree that without programming Mathcad is virtually useless to me – I’d just use Excel and MS Equation generation tools. Symbolics is a “use most of the time” feature, so if that was missing I would need to keep dropping back to older versions.
The Mathcad programming was always a bit clunky, but it was very powerful.
This is an entirely new implementation, and as such it’s my understanding that Matchad 14/15 is going to be sold at the same time as Mathcad Prime until Mathcad Prime is “complete”.
But because it is a re-implementation rather than an upgrade so the look, feel and features are different. You can see the basic look and feel on the Mathcad conference site which I think is still open for a while. My guess is that it is a redesign from the ground up and that it has been designed to integrate more easily with other applications.
Anyway, all I’m saying is to hold off on judging this product until it is actually released. That’s what I’m doing.
Cheers,
Philip