does it read and write solidworks files?
ds
_______________________________________________________________________ Integrated Controls, Inc. Tel: 415-647-0480 EXT 107 2851 21st Street Fax: 415-647-3003 San Francisco, CA 94110 www.integratedcontrolsinc.com
Matt Pobursky wrote:
I recently had the need to purchase some 3D Modeling software. Most all my clients use Solidworks, but frankly I can't justify $5K+ plus yearly maintenance for a seat of something I'll only use maybe a few dozen times a year.
I looked around and ran across Alibre Design. I took their web seminar, demo'd it and bought it (it has a 60 day money back guarantee). What really sold me on the software was that it was designed with the 80/20 rule: Give the users at least 80% of the functionality of the industry leader at 20% of their price. It seems to deliver on that promise as I can't find much that Solidworks does that Alibre Design doesn't do. They have an excellent on-line users forum that is comparable to this list -- lots of kowledgeable and helpful users. So far I'm very pleased with it and it seems relatively bug free.
I also ran across an on-line article written by the CEO of Alibre -- I think he hits the nail squarely on the head in regards to the "questionable" upgrade cycle taken by so many CAD vendors:
http://www.designnews.com/article/CA478166.html
How does this relate to Altium? I think we know the answer to that. Alibre seems to practice what they preach and I for one find it refreshing! I think Altium could learn a lot from a company like Alibre but of course they're free to do as they choose...
Matt Pobursky Maximum Performance Systems
On Fri, 19 Nov 2004 14:46:43 -0500, Bagotronix Tech Support wrote:
> I would upgrade if they would simply offer us laggers a reasonable > fixed upgrade price. The more upgrades that occur, the more > expensive it is, and less likely it is that I will upgrade. The > next version will likely be better, and add additional modules I > don't need, and the increased price to upgrade will probably scare > me away again. I can't imagine I'm the only one in this situation.
Their theory is that Altium needs to make a guaranteed revenue amount from laggard upgraders, nearly on par with the revenue from enthusiast upgraders. That's why each new version has a more onerous upgrade price. If they didn't do that, users could more easily justify skipping a version or two and it would save the user money at the expense of reducing Altium's revenues. In other words, it's a way to prevent the laggard mentality from cannibalizing the enthusiast mentality.
Unfortunately, it does mean that Altium will lose some customers over the long haul. I guess they feel they have to set a lower limit on the *effective* price of using Protel. For those of us buyers who cannot agree with the seller on a price, we will have to take our business elsewhere.
> I don't need the FPGA support. I just need a decent program for > schematic capture and PCB design. That's it. Protel used to be > the perfect program for that. Protel is complete overkill for that > now. I don't see that Protel wants me as a customer, so I don't > think it is unreasonable to ask members of this forum if there is > anything out there that may fit my minimal needs a bit more > economically. Any recommendations?
That is the problem with so many categories of software. Within the past decade, so much software has become "gentrified", that is, priced out of the original market. It's a plague that swept the world starting in the dot-com era, and long after the dot-com crash the effects of product gentrification still remain. The software space is now inhabited by Free/Open Source Software, very expensive closed-source software, and not much in between. Even Windows, the most common OS, has been gentrified. $300 for a retail boxed copy of XPpro, $200 for XPhome. The problem with not having much in between those 2 extremes is that the free/open stuff is frequently not easily usable in it's supplied form, and the proprietary stuff is too expensive and locks user's data into proprietary formats (vendor lock- in). It's truly a sad state of affairs.
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