Has anybody tried the new Mathcad 15?

[PNachtwey]

It would be nice to have a review.
There are many things that irk me about M13 and I refuse to upgrade until they are fixed.
A few of the things are:
a-b seems to be always displayed as -b+a.
Mathcad doesn't generate proper html files because the paths use \ instead of /.
Editing still has flaws. Sometimes Mathcad can figure out where to put the brackets. I put the cursor where I want to put the bracket and Mathcad puts the bracket some other place.
The symbolic solver took a step backwards from M13 to M14. There are problems I can solve with M13 that M14 can't.
Scrolling or selecting long equations that stretch across a page is difficult and slow if there are intense calculations. Mathcad keeps moving the cursor back towards the center of the line and makes it hard to select the whole line.
I still must do too much cutting and pasting compared to wxMaxima were a whole formula can be represent by a symbol or variable. One can select the right or left hand side and manipulate the forumula.
The documentation for the optimizers is not clear. The quasi-Newton only needs a score but the Levenberg-Marquardt needs an array of errors. What does the conjugate gradient need?
I can't substitute a symbol for an expression. This would make many long expressions shorter because often they have a square root term that is used many times.
It would be nice if there was a way to force expressions to wrap on the same page
Often I am smarter than Mathcad and would like to have and assist mode where I can simply do an operation to both sides the an equation.


Peter Nachtwey
Delta Computer Systems

http://www.deltamotion.com

 

[IRstuff]

M15 is essentially M14 M045, or thereabouts. It's not a completely new version. They've added Design of Experiments as the major change. Symbolic engine is the same as the one in M14. That's about all I know about it, mostly from hearsay...

TTFN

FAQ731-376

 

[4Pipes]

I upgraded to 15 on maintenance. For all practical purposes, I have not found anything for normal use that is different to 14. I have not used the design of experiments, Knovel, or true numbers. I still use it for the reason I purchase 1.1 - doing basic calcs. 15 seems to be the same as 14. I suspect that the average user will not see much difference.

I am surprised that PTC did not make an attempt to do something to the basic interface to stamp their mark on it. It does not shout upgrade to an average user like me. Had they thrown in an over-bar font and a dot and double dot font and other science and engineering fonts then I would have been pleased. Seems that 15 years has passed and nothing has happened.

 

[IRstuff]

The big change was switching from Maple to Mupad, but I'm not sure if PTC was involved in that.

Oddly, while Mathcad has not shifted that much, neither have any other program, with the exception of SMath, which seems to have a bit of a clunky interface.

TTFN

FAQ731-376