well articulated Hamid!!!
Hoorah
----- Original Message -----
From: "Hamid A. Wasti" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: "Protel EDA Discussion List" <[email protected]>
Sent: Saturday, June 11, 2005 2:37 PM
Subject: Re: [PEDA] Worth it to upgrade to DXP?
I was misled into buying the DXP upgrade back a couple of years ago. In
these two years I have tried DXP and DXP/2004 several times and was
disgusted every time. I have done a couple of complete designs with them
and mentored a few people that are using it. I have not tried SP3, but
DXP/2004 with SP2 was still not worth the upgrade. I started using it for
a project last month and after wasting 4 days, started from scratch with
99SE and was done in less than 4 days.
If you want any of the new functionality, then maybe the upgrade is
worthwhile. If all you do is Schematic & PCB like I do, it is just not
worth it. The whole interface is severely degraded. Everyone would agree
that it is different and to me it is worse, hence the classification of
degraded.
The new schematic interface is especially annoying. When I put down a
connection I want it to go where I tell it to go, not where some geek in a
cubicle hanging upside down from the bottom of the globe decided it ought
to go.
The whole selection/focus thing in PCB is inefficient. Yes, it is now
"Windows Compliant" but the old way made more sense for the PCB and was
faster and more efficient. It is the difference between having a "Windows
Standard" knife that you need to use with your steak, your bread, your
vegetables and your butter, or having specialized bread, butter, steak and
boning knives plus a cleaver.
The whole interface has a look which makes things harder to read. If you
double click on a via for example, the hole and diameter are there, but
they are no longer in a box but rather printed as standard text on a
standard background and hence do not stand out. Your eyes have to search
for them and focus on the numbers. Plus they are not next to each other,
so there is more eye effort and refocusing. Yes we are taking fractions
of seconds for eye movement and refocusing, but if you are doing something
thousands and thousands of times a day, fractions of seconds add up to
hours. And if you happen to be using anything other than standard size
fonts, the numbers spill their spaces overwriting other text and become
completely illegible. Obviously no one has tested the product under any
conditions other than whatever the developers happen to develop it under.
The same "text blending into the background" problem exists in virtually
all dialogues.
Enough people have written enough about the query language that I will not
bead that horse again. That horse should be dead by now :) The problem
with it is that it is not really documented and simple everyday global
tasks take more keystrokes, more mouse movement and more eye focusing.
Actually that is the case with most commonly used things, resulting in
lower productivity and higher eye strain. The increased eyes strain
further limits both your productivity and limits the number of productive
hours you can work at a time or in a day. Obviously no one at Altium that
designed the user interface either used the system or was familiar enough
with these issues to pay any attention to them.
Last, but not the least, the software runs slower -- a LOT slower.
Maybe the real bottom line is this: If you are a "lite" user, you may not
find much of a slowdown, you may even find a gail. But if you are a
"power user" you will severely degrade your output and are better off
staying with 99SE.
Regards,
Hamid
[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
UPS just drove in with a package of Altium's latest sales pitch to try to
get us old stick-in-the-mud 99SE users to upgrade by June 30. If all the
marketing-ese were actually factual, and all those features actually
worked, it just might be worthwhile to upgrade. Can anybody here give any
insight, pro or con, on whether with SP3, DXP is finally worth the upgrade
$$$??
Steve Hendrix
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