Maple Flow vs SMath or MathCAD 6

[RFreund]

I'm curious if anyone has used Maple Flow, it is relatively new. I'm mostly asking those that use Mathcad or SMath heavily (I think there a few SMather's on here now). Curious to hear how you think it compares (mostly relative to SMath).
Thanks!

 

[IRstuff]

Google or Apple decides enough is enough and produces a 100% work-alike plus more features for free

Google already did that, but they decided to put up their own Office software, which makes sense from their perspective, since the question of Mathcad is centered around a user-base in the hundreds of thousands, if that much, while Office has millions of users.

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[TLHS]

Koot, on the topic of free things disappearing, I've just archived my own copy of the SMath installer and the plugins that I use. The license lets you redistribute if you haven't modified the installer, and there's no license code or anything you need to run the installer, so even if it were to disappear off the face of the earth I could spend a few years transitioning myself off of it without worrying about it and I'd always have my own copy I could use to open my worksheets.

I'm not far enough into it that I am necessarily committed long term to it as software, but I'm not worried about it disappearing into thin air and leaving me hanging.

I also like that I can just send people a link to the software if I'm trying to share a calc with another person.

 

[3DDave]

"and keeps it current for more than a decade" is the critical part. Google has left me with abandonment issues on a great number of projects.

However - thanks for the tip - I found that they offer a way to get information about YouTube videos that could be helpful. And, great, another API. Sigh.

 

[IRstuff]

Google has left me with abandonment issues on a great number of projects.

That's the issue with small user bases, or non-existent user bases, in addition to just bad implementations. But, product lifecycles are the nature of commercial products, free or otherwise; Wang Word Processor, Wordstar, WordPerfect, Lotus123, etc., all bit the dust because their companies just couldn't maintain their user bases. Mathcad's original developer, Mathsoft, could't generate enough revenue to maintain their product; admittedly, it was basically a one-product company, while PTC has a family of products and they've made some attempt at integrating Mathcad with their CAD products.

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[NorthCivil]

mathcad probably could have kept a much more loyal customer base, had they somehow built in backwards compatibility.

back in ~2016, my companys entire technical arsenal was based in mathcad 14 spreadsheets, had hundreds of them.

new computers dont support mathcad 14, needed to upgrade to 15 or prime.

spent 5 figures on 15/prime, none of the old spreadsheets would function. needed to recreate all of the spreadsheets.

most of the engineers didnt like the new interface of 15/prime.

Business was worried that we would spend huge resource re-creating all the spreadsheets, and we would need to do so once again in a few years when the next mathcad was released.

PTC tee'd us up perfectly to abandon their product and transition to Smath.

how pathetic is it that they couldnt figure out how to provide backwards compatibility. If they could have done so, they would have sold so much more software just based on businesses inertia.

 

[JoshPlumSE]

how pathetic is it that they couldnt figure out how to provide backwards compatibility. If they could have done so, they would have sold so much more software just based on businesses inertia.

Yup! I had a very similar experience. However, it happened to me twice over the years! Totally inexcusable. And, it was so obvious that they were doing it purely to bleed some out of existing users that didn't really need the new version. Very frustrating.

That's when I started preferring to do any hand calcs with either Excel or SMath. I really liked the functionality of older versions of MathCAD too. I would have been okay with them explicitly saying that they wanted to move to a "subscription" based license. But, the whole idea of being required to "purchase" a new version for no good reason (maybe they wanted their quarterly revenue to look better)... that just really got under my skin.

 

[3DDave]

PTC is in the business of integrating their software into an interoperable whole, not supplying individual parts. I expect the rewrite was to provide that interoperability and existing customers from before could go to SMath.

In a related move, when PTC started out they kept all the big fish to themselves and let VARs exist to sell to mid and little fish. Then someone at PTC decided that sales were lagging and cut off the majority of VARs. Smooth move. They had hundreds of people at those VARs excited about PTC software, knew the good features and bad, and then just cut off their livelihood. I expect most went to Solidworks and expressed their new dedication to hurting PTC by selling the hell out of Solidworks. They had the contacts of all the people hesitant at the high PTC prices, they knew the PTC weak spots, and now they had a way to revenge. A well trained sales staff, practically made to order.

And yet - for a decade they managed an out-of-step relationship between their CAD and their PDM solutions, eventually destroying the one that worked really well for the company size I was part of.

 

[IRstuff]

how pathetic is it that they couldnt figure out how to provide backwards compatibility. If they could have done so, they would have sold so much more software just based on businesses inertia.

PTC could, but chose not to; even Mathsoft was able to rewrite the program while maintaining backward compatibility. M15 seemed pretty compatible with the older versions I had, and I think PTC deliberately made the conversion to Prime harder to force people to switch over, but what really killed Prime as a viable replacement, aside from cost, was the fact that it took Prime nearly 6 major revisions to get to the functionality that M15 originally had. I stopped using Prime, even though I was involved with beta testing through Prime4; the changes were just too incremental for my liking. I've actually reverted to M14, because it's more compatible with the newer versions of Windows, while having some distance from the M12/M13 redesign debacle.

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[3DDave]

If their goal was to force a switch they would not have included a license to 15 with the license to Prime.

They could have managed to be 100% compatible in the same way I could have won Powerball. I expect management saddled the development team with the integration task first, there being no other pressing reason for PTC to buy it, and doing that meant they couldn't also have people doing anything but the bare minimum core development. Once full compatibility was by the wayside it would no longer be a priority. Why fix what was completely broken?

I talked to Heppelmann for a few moments and all I got from it was this is a guy who is focused solely on the delta with the next quarter. When they destroyed PTC User that was it for me.

 

[IRstuff]

If their goal was to force a switch they would not have included a license to 15 with the license to Prime.

M15 was ostensibly included to run the one-way converter for all previous versions to Prime. That's something they could have included in Prime directly, but they didn't. Note that M15's file format is XML, which, I think, is also the format for Prime, although it's compressed, and XML is highly portable.

[edit] I wonder if it was because PTC didn't buy, or wasn't allowed to buy, Mathcad code for prior versions of M15, and the only way around it was to use the M15's backward compatibility to read older files and save them in XML and then convert to Prime.

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[TLHS]

My issue with MathCAD since it's been under PTC has generally been that they haven't added significant features I care about. It's been a decade and the release items that have mattered to me have been some minor formatting improvements and one or two workflow things. It's a subscription based service and I don't care about basically anything they've done since that's the model they started pushing.

You get major releases like Prime 5 that had:

-Graphing improvements that included: adding gridlines, formatting your plot axes, adding a second y axis and putting titles on your plots (plot titles took 5 major releases?)
Breaking equations across multiple lines at locations other than the equals sign
OLE embedding, which I'm never going to use, but is Windows 3.1 era high tech
Password protecting sheet areas

How is that a major release? I wouldn't pay a several hundred dollar upgrade cost to get this, which is what the subscription model implies.

That would be completely fine if it was treated as a static piece of software, but that's not how it's sold.

Paying $850 CAD per year for a piece of software that isn't giving me updates I care about is a really hard pill to swallow. Several thousand dollars over a decade for something that feels like a piece of software that should cost me two hundred bucks. I would probably not have blinked previously at paying $850 for a perpetual license if that were an option, but I've found enough functionality elsewhere now that I can't picture doing that either.

 

[TLHS]

Wait, only the graphing features were new to Prime 5. The other features were 'improvements' to that were added to Prime 4. Those features were added in 4 and there were tweaks to them in 5.

Updates have been so unimpactful to me that I once ended up three versions behind on a work computer because I didn't bother to tell IT to upgrade me, even though there was no cost to me as a user other than fifteen minutes of someone fiddling with my machine. If I don't want to spend 15 minutes of my time to get the features, I definitely don't want to pay $2500 over those same three release cycles.

 

[Sparweb]

Everyone,
You are on a treadmill.
Annual license is the direction that software has been going for many years. We didn't react soon enough in most cases. There are NO revolutionary changes to most of the software systems that we "could" be using from 10 years ago. Think about it...
Lots of examples...
Autocad
Solidworks
Office (Excel, Word, Ppt, Outlook, etc.)
Photoshop
Matlab
FEMAP

I have copies of these software that are >10 years old on my home computer, and the "2022" stuff at work. I can compare them any time. They are so similar that the differences aren't worth mentioning. I have a perpetual license to these, plus MC 13, and glad I do. But I missed out on plenty of other useful things before they switched to annual license and locked me out economically.

None of the most common program packages that engineers and designers use today have benefited from the thousands of dollars in license fees paid over the past decade. The next big obstacle is that the software licenses will drive operating system selection, which has probably already happened to many of you. That "no improvement next year" software update will drive you to invest in a new operating system - and hence new hardware to support the OS. To be forced to recycle not just the software but the OS and the computer itself... unacceptable.

 

[Ussuri]

Another piece of software I came across that was in development was Coda

Link

It's basis seems to be a hybrid of word processor and a spreadsheet, so you can use if to do free form spreadsheet type calculations in a document.

It looks like it is still in development.

 

[IRstuff]

Annual license is the direction that software has been going for many years.

It's actually a complete regression, not an evolution ;-) I started out where all my software was hosted on remote computers; remember dial-up timeshare? Office 365 is exactly that; your computer is mostly a dumb terminal when using it. The only saving grace is that most large computer companies still have to service companies that have air-gapped computers, so node-locked licenses are still extant.

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[SWComposites]

remember dial-up timeshare? UGH. yes. what a primitive nightmare. and before that, punch cards. then there were the hassles with "memory management", whether on the mainframe or on the early PCs.

 

[CrabbyT]

I'm not a fan of PTC Mathcad at all. I used it seven years ago, and have no interest in ever trying it again. It was very slow (in my personal experience). Also, according to others, PTC allegedly removed a bunch of very useful features whenever they took it over. Here's a comparison chart.

https://www.mathcad.com/-/media/Fil...Prime-8-vs-Mathcad-15-comparison-chart-en.pdf

I like SMath though.

 

[dik]

"Lots of examples...
Autocad
Solidworks
Office (Excel, Word, Ppt, Outlook, etc.)
Photoshop
Matlab
FEMAP"

and my choices, without cost or annual subscriptions:
Bricscad
LibreOffice (Excel, Word, Ppt, Outlook, etc.)
Paint.net, Gimp
SMath...

No requirement for FEMAP and Solidworks...

-----*****-----
So strange to see the singularity approaching while the entire planet is rapidly turning into a hellscape. -John Coates

-Dik

 

[GregLocock]

The basic functionality of Matlab hasn't changed much in 10 years, most of the effort seems to have gone into the toolboxes and frameworks. You can now build a complete vehicle model in Matlab, with computer vision, dynamics, and I think ESC and so on, and a drivetrain. That was not possible ten years ago without a lot of effort. The other thing they've put a lot of work in is cross compiling to embedded controllers. That means you can program in Simulink, and then drop the code into your hardware, seamlessly.


Cheers

Greg Locock


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[dik]

CrabbyT... the items with the double check marks are common to both I would assume.

-----*****-----
So strange to see the singularity approaching while the entire planet is rapidly turning into a hellscape. -John Coates

-Dik