Some Altium Beta Program users share their thoughts on the development of Altium Designer Release 10.
"Very capable. The new features that I have worked with are very exciting. The Grid Manager is already saving time and effort in layouts."
James Johnson
Vanteon Corporation
"I like the direction that they are taking adding features to the FPGA and embedded side. That is a different realm though to most of the PCB designers that use Altium, and is probably seen as unused features that are being added. Some of the things that they are doing though really has the possibility to revolutionize embedded development.
One example is the AGUI development. Our company looked at getting some type of development environment to develop guis at the embedded level several years ago. Everything was very custom and nichy from what we found, and people wanted 60k to just get the tools, and then it was going to need hands-on custom work from the company to get you started, and often they wanted a per-product fee.
The FPGA and embedded work flows that Altium is coming up with just make sense. In the same way that they have made schematic to PCB eco's very simple compared to previous tools (I'm thinking of PCAD), they've done the same thing with embedded CPU's, FPGAs, and schematic."
Mike Barber
Directed Energy-Ixys Colordo
"I really like the additions to AD09 and AD10 in terms of 3D support such as variants and 3D body improvements. I never thought I would really use the 3D tool until AD09 made it practical to make good renditions for assembly visuals etc."
Christopher Leidigh
Alektrona Corporation
"LOVE the polar grid feature, totally useful to me and the improvements to relative paths in outjob are real nice."
Dennis Saputelli
Integrated Controls Inc
So, getting a bit tired of doing layout, we managed (with the help of a few folks here) to take a part of a reference design and merge it into our massive active project. It almost wasn't worth it as we discovered that the rules used in the reference design were extremely aggressive (<3/3/3 rules). Some cleanup allowed it to work *whew*. Since I was very focused on a small part of a much larger design, I didn't realize my merge data accidentally included a bunch of other gunk outside of the area I was concentrating on. This got all mixed in with existing completed layout areas and made a giant mess. I didn't see it until after about 12 hours of work.
So last night I took a look at the overall design and see all of this this gunk, and went into panic mode. It was almost impossible to clean it all out manually as there was not much to differentiate on. Then I realized I could use collaboration to take the design before the manual merge, and only collaboration merge in the section small section I was working on that took the 12 hours. After only 15 minutes of work, I was saved!
So collaboration is not only useful for segregating and merging work, it is also useful for "undoing" mistake areas. Very powerful, and THANK YOU Altium for making this possible.
Mark Wyman
Vanteon Corporation
It's true, I can confirm a huge improvement of the memory management.
Also Win 7 x64, I've opened several huge PCB files with 3D models and AD it's still working :-)
The Task Manager shows such lower memory usage of the R10 DXP.exe than it was in S09.
Congratulations!"
Grzegorz Witek
Evatronix SA
"I really like the new configurability of the Wishbone Ports."
Douglas George
Diffraction Limited
"Very much faster and more responsive compared to Summer '09. Routing features are more intuitive, and some features which were missing before have been addressed such as rerouting differential pairs."
Jon Fuge
Renishaw PLC
