Update for Altium Designer 10

Just  released a new update for Altium Designer 10.

This release focuses primarily on developments to the system components, including the addition of more preferences that can be imported/exported. And we’ve also fixed another couple of BugCrunch reports:

1. Schematics now display text correctly in all supported languages and simulations work correctly regardless of the machines language settings.
2. CAMtastic Reload layer data command no longer kills AD10.

These are two issues that were reported and verified by our development team. And rather than send them through the voting process, we accepted them directly for fixing. So in this case, you didn’t need to vote - we just wanted to crunch!

We have also been working on the crashes being reported in the forums as a high priority for fixing. With this release, we have added the ability to send crash reports when these failures happen. Crash reports give us vital information about what happened at the time of the crash - so completing these crash reports will help us in identifying what is causing these ongoing issues. When the failure occurs, just click on the Send Report button, and complete the details, with as much information as possible about what you were doing at the time of the crash. Once it is sent, also post on the forum so that we can identify the report and engage with you on further information that may be required.

 

Altium moving HQ and R&D to China - Its True!

This was posted on the other forum by Clare Jolly, confirming details that were being tossed around. I know that some can't get the Altium Live messages yet:
*******************************
Hey guys,


We are excited to confirm that the rumors are true! We are in fact moving our company’s HQ and core development activities to Shanghai.


As you can appreciate we were bound by certain ASX regulations, which prevented us from responding to your posts earlier.


However, a short time ago (Tuesday afternoon Sydney time) we updated the Australian Securities Exchange (ASX) with our bold plans to move our company’s HQ operations to Shanghai, China.   


You can read the ASX announcement here.


Warm regards,
Altium HQ
*****************************

The link to the ASX announcement is:
http://asx.com.au/asxpdf/20110405/pdf/41xw3rspcw7yq7.pdf

Update to Altium Designer 10

The next update for Altium Designer 10, and the first since we released the software three weeks ago.

Our strategy with Altium Designer 10 and AltiumLive is to provide users on the Subscriber Plan with updates and new content on cycles of days and weeks, not months or years.

With the recent updates to our Shanghai and Hobart vaults, and this new update to Altium Designer 10, we can demonstrate what this means in reality (always better than in theory).

With this first update, we have chosen to keep it relatively light - only two new plug-ins with a download of less than 20MB. More details are in the release notes.

This update also sees the first BugCrunch fix!

This particular BugCrunch fix relates to a problem in the clearance rules for differential pairs and was raised by Claudio Veronesi. This bug was in fact an example of one that just needed to be fixed, so it didn’t need to go through the voting process.  But kudos to Claudio for “owning” the first-ever bug crunched!

To update your Altium Designer 10 installation, go to the Plug-in page (DXP >> Plug-ins and Updates) and select “Update All”.  

 

We have released Altium Designer 1O and AltiumLive!

It’s been anticipated for some time: we are now shipping Altium Designer 10 and AltiumLive.

We will kick off the process of getting everyone with a current Subscription contract on to Altium Designer 10, and into AltiumLive, as quickly as we possibly can.

To say that we are excited by this moment is an understatement! To say that we are slightly relieved finally to release Altium Designer 10 and AltiumLive is also probably true!

We appreciate everyone’s interest, patience, and the dynamic discussions that have taken place about what we’ve had planned.

AltiumLive is the new ecosystem for professional electronics designers. It’s the new access point for Altium Designer. And, it’s the place where we will be delivering design content under subscription.

Over the coming days you will receive an email invitation from us which will give you a unique activation link for AltiumLive.

All you need to do is step through the activation process, choose your AltiumLive plan and log into AltiumLive. If you have any issues during the activation process, use the cool new LiveChat feature - one of the Altium team will be at the other end!

This Altium Designer forum will continue for now, until we complete the roll-out of AltiumLive to all of our customers. However, the new Forums in AltiumLive will also be active. We will be monitoring both through the switch over, and merge them once the roll-out is complete (and we’ll let you know when we do this, too).

The current altium.com website will also remain live until the roll-out is complete. You can take a look at http://www.live.altium.com/ and browse the altium.com web pages. You will not be able to sign in until you have been through the activation process.

Here are just some of the highlights of AltiumLive:

• Software - this section of AltiumLive contains links to download Altium Designer and our other applications.

• Content - check out our new Content Vaults that store our qualified, released, ready-to-use design entities, from the components through to loaded boards. More vaults will be added in the future. This is how content will be provided as updates from now on, to users on the new Subscriber Plan.
• Subscriptions - three new AltiumLive membership plans. If you’re currently on Altium Subscription, you automatically become a member of the new Subscriber Plan with continuity of benefits, and some new ones too.
• Rewards - you will notice that we have a new rewards system which is our AltiumLive community currency. Your points are part of your AltiumLive membership and can be used and accumulated through your actions in AltiumLive's Forum, BugCrunch, and Blog.
• BugCrunch - this is where you can directly influence the development of Altium software, the place where you can log those issues that you know about. But don’t just report them - nominate reports that others have logged, and vote for the ones that you want to see crunched!

There is so much more we could tell you, but what we would really like you to do is activate your account and explore. So keep an eye out for your AltiumLive activation link. It will be in your inbox soon.

Altium Designer 10 release date announced

Altium has announced the date that it will ship the next release of Altium Designer: 31 January 2011.

There are many things to get excited about in this new release, but in a nutshell, it changes how you manage component and design data, and take products from design to manufacture.

Visit the new Altium Designer website - ad10.altium.com - for regular updates on Altium Designer 10 and its capabilities between now and release date.

Morfik and Altium

Morfik and Altium

With Morfik Version 3 and Altium Designer Release 10, both companies have reached their next inflection point. At this point we have chosen to join forces to pursue the next stage. We believe that together Altium and Morfik can empower those who choose to develop the device-based ecosystems that will be needed.

The three pillars of this are:

• Device Design – Designing smart connected devices that make up the physical structure of the ecosystem. PCs, Servers and “Application Specific” devices. This is the traditional business of Altium.
• Cloud/Web Application Design – The Web-Apps that will run across the “Sea of Devices”. This is the business of Morfik.
• Infrastructure - the Internet-based resources that the devices and web-applications run on. This is new for the Internet era, but is becoming available on an industrial scale from people like Amazon.

The second of these three pillars is where Morfik and Altium intersect – The development of web-based applications.

Morfik is clearly the provider of the technology for web-applications. Although this has been historically focused on serving solutions to browsers in PCs, with Morfik 3 this has moved to more direct support for iPads and iPhones. These are still general purpose personal computers but they are the first step in moving beyond the PC-based browser.

The community of expertise that has developed around Morfik and its technology is a precious resource for this undertaking. We see the Morfik customer base today (something that we would like to see grow significantly) as an important starting point for the evolution of a community of web-application developers who can develop the web-applications that are an important part of these future ecosystems.

As a technology that provides a true object-oriented software-engineered approach to web-app development, Morfik is unique in the world. Engineering these ecosystems is not something that will be accomplished by the script-based approaches so common in the web-world today. It will take real software engineers and real software engineering to build these.

For those who see Morfik as a way to develop their own PC-based web-apps today (most Morfik customers today), we would hope you will stick around and work with us as we undertake the next stage of this journey. At the very least you will be able to benefit from the work we intend to do – work which we hope will take Morfik’s web-application development model to the next level.

And for those who are keen to be part of this next stage, designing web-applications that power these ecosystems, I hope that you find the prospects for the future as exciting as we do.

 

To read the complete article

http://blog.morfik.com/2010/10/08/morfik-and-altium/

 

Altium formally announced its intent to buy Morfik Technology

Altium formally announced its intent to buy Morfik Technology to the market this morning Sydney time.

You can read the announcement to the Australian Securities Exchange and the media release in the Investor and Media sections of our web site.

Morfik is an Australian software company whose products are used by professional software engineers to design, engineer and deploy cloud-based software applications.

Our plan is to merge our development teams and our respective technologies as part of the long term plan of helping our industry make the transition from designing stand-alone discrete devices to designing and engineering connected device ecosystems. This is something we’ve talked about, and been developing, for a few years now.

We can now accelerate the development of this platform for Altium’s customers. When developed, this platform will form the basis of the tools and infrastructure required to help electronics designers develop their own ecosystems of intelligent, connected devices, running their own cloud-based applications.

All members of Morfik’s team will be joining Altium, including the team in Sydney and Hobart, in Australia, and in Kiev, in the Ukraine. Morfik’s co-founders and senior developers will remain with Altium, which provides us with an outstanding group of experts to complement our home-grown team.

The merging of our development teams also lets us refocus and re-task our combined development of the forthcoming release of Altium Designer. And while we complete the acquisition, we are planning to move quickly on creating the web presence for our new content stream. This is in turn based on the package system that will be part of the new release of Altium Designer. To accelerate this process we are moving to get our teams working together as quickly as possible so that we can jointly attack the objectives ahead.

Nick Martin's white paper, published last year, sets the scene. Read it here: http://altium.com/files/pdfs/WhatsNextForElectronicsDevicesWhitePaper.pdf.