Free Altium is Coming

[EEVblog]

Any idea if allowing local storage will be a paid option?
Similarly is push-and-shove likely to be a paid option?

Nope and nope. Not at this stage anyway.
But as I said, they seem very willing the change this based on beta feedback/rage.

[Mr.B]

I am a hobbyist user of Eagle. Designed and delivered loads of PCBs.
Yes, I am restricted to two layers, 80mm... etc...
BUT... I am a hobbyist, and the 80mm restriction also adds a unique challenge with some projects.
If Altium want to secure the Eagle user market, they are going to have to do better.
From a personal perspective I will not put anything in the cloud that I have spent many Sunday afternoons working on.
I simply don't trust the cloud service providers... Here today, gone tomorrow.
At the moment I would be more inclined to purchase a "non-free" license from Eagle than invest time in Altium.
My 10c worth...

[Psi]

It might not be too bad if you can pay a few $ to get a local copy.

That way you can make PCBs and get boards produced all you want, rev1-6 etc..
Once your happy with the design and maybe want to take the project to the next level you could pay some money and get the file local.


Anyone know if you can import a gerber file into full AD and use it to generate PCB copper?

[MattiStef]

As an alternative to other free ECAD software i see no problem with any of this, its free.
Im wondering though if it will be possibe to cooperate on a board with other users. Or if you could get feedack or see how your desing has been changed by other users? F.ex. you work on a board with a fellow student, it is public as working. A couple weeks later you could see someone used your design but upgraded to an arm, changed to 12v supply or made it smaller.

[Psi]

I suspect the number of people who can code well in Delphi is around 0.1% of the number of people who can code well in Fortran, Algol and ADA.

Delphi has 0.7% market share, or it did when i last looked at the stats last year. (It used to have a lot more)

It may claw some more back in the years to come, some of the new multi-platform stuff they are doing is really innovative.  If they can get linux support added it will be a good option for getting native multiplatform software on all the platforms out there with a consistent UI experience.

[mikeselectricstuff]

Have had another talk and demo with Altium
Some answers to some questions:

- NO, you will not be able to save files locally, they must be stored online in the cloud.

Fail. If I can't work because my internet connection or their server is down that is completely unacceptable.
What happens if you've spent hours on a design & suddenly can't save it? Is there a way to deal with this situation?
Any paid version would absolutely have to allow standalone use or they won't get any significant sales.

Yes, that sucks. But it is most certainly a PC based program, nothing web based. The whole idea behind this is to encourage and share projects and libraries online.

There's a difference between encouraging and forcing.

There will be lots of community power in the program to do this I can't talk about quite yet. Suffice it to say that the community is the cornerstone of the entire concept of the tool.

Which presupposes enough community to be useful.

 So it won't have the likes of push'n'shove,

Fail - this is an essential feature in any modern PCB software.

- YES, the free version can be used for commercial projects.

But who is going to risk doing a commercial project on something dependent on their server and them not abandoning it some time in the future?

- The free version will have a limit on how many projects you can keep "private". You can pay for more private projects. Once again the emphasis is on encouraging open projects and sharing with the community. Yes you'll be able to work on your project privately until it's released though.
 

How can they stop people using multiple accounts to get round this?

Unless they provide some way to make it useable standalone it will be a dead duck. I can't see that they have a chance in hell of making any significant inroads into the market. Maybe if they;d done it a few years ago, but I think it's too little, too late.

[mikeselectricstuff]

Any idea if allowing local storage will be a paid option?
Similarly is push-and-shove likely to be a paid option?

Nope and nope. Not at this stage anyway.
But as I said, they seem very willing the change this based on beta feedback/rage.

Although probably acceptable for a free tool, unless you can pay a reasonable amount to remove this restriction, they will fail to get people to commit to a paid version, which has to be their ultimate goal to make it worthwhile.
 
Even for  free version, it is essential that data is not lost if the connection or server fails - there absolutely has to be a way of locally saving something, even if it needs a subsequent login before, say, you can export gerbers.
 
It is inevitable that this functionality will get hacked at some point.
Unless they offer people a legitimate way to upgrade, they just won't make any money.

[tautech]

Link to mikeselectricstuff's Altium Free POLL:
https://www.eevblog.com/forum/altium/altium-free-version/msg513318/#msg513318

[timb]

As an alternative to other free ECAD software i see no problem with any of this, its free.
Im wondering though if it will be possibe to cooperate on a board with other users. Or if you could get feedack or see how your desing has been changed by other users? F.ex. you work on a board with a fellow student, it is public as working. A couple weeks later you could see someone used your design but upgraded to an arm, changed to 12v supply or made it smaller.

This is another point I forgot to make with the comparison to Upverter.

That's one huge feature of Upverter that I really love: Collaboration. It makes working with another designer halfway across the world so, so easy.

For public designs, you can mark it as "feedback wanted" and it'll go into a special list where people can critique it (much like what happens here on the forums) with additional ability to add annotations and markup.

These are reason I put up with Upverter being a WebApp. It has it's place, for sure. But at the end of the day, I still use DipTrace 75% of the time.

Altium needs to decide if it wants to be a WebApp or a PC Program. You can't have it both ways.


Sent from my Smartphone

[ludzinc]

"Windows XP2: Cloud Boogaloo"

 

[Precipice]

But who is going to risk doing a commercial project on something dependent on their server and them not abandoning it some time in the future?

Didn't Dave say that there would be a method to allow full-fat Altium users to import this lite stuff?
If so, then laundering projects for a fiver a go would seem sensible, for people who want an archive copy.

It looks to me as if Altium have quite neatly split the market, between toy customers who don't mind the risk of downtime, and people on a deadline with data security requirements, who'll just stick with the proper version. There's not a lot of overlap.

That said, when Altium's license server stopped playing a year or two back, I was livid...

[mikeselectricstuff]

That said, when Altium's license server stopped playing a year or two back, I was livid...

A problem is that all the people who come up with these web-based concepts are used to having reliable, fast internet connections, and don't think about the implications for people who don't.

[T3sl4co1l]

More than a little loaded, yes...

Tim

[mikeselectricstuff]

Link to mikeselectricstuff's Altium Free POLL:
https://www.eevblog.com/forum/altium/altium-free-version/msg513318/#msg513318

Yes - I consider reliance on the net and their server to be an acceptable risk

Doesn't this poll option mean all other options have an implicit inference that the cloud risk is unacceptable? Or am I biased and therefore missing something?

The whole issue is about risk of not being able to use it, or losing data.
If you could guarantee that you will never be unable to talk to their server, now or any time in the future than it's a complete non-issue, however there will always be a risk that you won't be able to phone home, so the acceptability of this model boils down to how acceptable you consider this risk to be, and whether the benefits of this package outweigh it.

[_Sin]

I find it interesting that there's already a definite trend in the poll towards people not being interested at all, and almost no-one who would pay a small amount to have a non-cloud option.

People really have high expectations for "free" these days.

Altium's (apparent) model is strange though. Already there is unease at the idea of people subscribing to software (see the fuss over Adobe's recent moves), and now we're being asked (essentially) to subscribe to our own *data*. There are lots of cloud based applications and data storage options, but I can't think of too many which don't actually allow you to get the data back out again.

It just feels like someone high up had a brain fart and they've run with it without really thinking it through.

Especially if the target market are hobbyist types, many of whom may not be designing stuff sat at a desk with a good internet connection, but might be doing stuff in spare time on a laptop wherever they happen to be, and often either with poor or non-existent internet connection. It would rule it out for me - not through choice, it just simply wouldn't work.

[IanJ]

Fail. If I can't work because my internet connection or their server is down that is completely unacceptable.
What happens if you've spent hours on a design & suddenly can't save it? Is there a way to deal with this situation?
Any paid version would absolutely have to allow standalone use or they won't get any significant sales.

Maybe they'll adopt a system whereby that in the event of the Net going down mid session then the software would save to cache which would allow you to close down the software/PC, and then when you bring it back up again it reconciliates with the server to save. Thats gotta be minumum functionality..........

Ian.

[DerekG]

Want to move from AD to Eagle or KiCAD or DIPtrace, or...? Altium won't help you with that:

No worries. I regularly move AD files across to DipTrace by using the PCAD Export Filter. Works very well. Sometimes there is just a few minutes spent to clean up the component overlay(s).

I was looking forward to trying Altium but if there is no local backup/save, sorry. That's just not usable, not even for toy projects.

I fully agree.

people will likely rather stay with Eagle/Diptrace/Kicad/whatever.

Fully agree again.

What were these guys thinking? 

No, the question should be: What were these guys smoking?

If Altium want to secure the Eagle user market, they are going to have to do better.

Fully agree. A whole lot better.

[EEVblog]

Once your happy with the design and maybe want to take the project to the next level you could pay some money and get the file local.

That would work.

My solution if I had to compromise on this would be to allows local saving and have the ability to work off-line doing the PCB, but when you want to finish the project ad generate the files you have to log into the system.
Schematic and libraries can stay online if needed, as with their back-end you'll want to do this anyway (as you'll see come release), and then when ready to lay out the board, go into off-line routing mode for a week while you finish your board.

That way Altium could compromise on allowing local saving to keep everyone happy, but then still satisfy their goal of having everything online to do the community stuff.

[mikeselectricstuff]

What about parts ? Can you create & keep parts locally or do you also need to do this online?

[EEVblog]

Im wondering though if it will be possibe to cooperate on a board with other users. Or if you could get feedack or see how your desing has been changed by other users?

Actually co-operative design like Altium tried with AD that allows working on the same file at the same time, I'm not entirely sure. But there are some powerful community features to enable you to get feedback on your design as you describe.

[EEVblog]

Fail. If I can't work because my internet connection or their server is down that is completely unacceptable.
What happens if you've spent hours on a design & suddenly can't save it? Is there a way to deal with this situation?

Yes, don't be dumb and not save 
They are also talking about maybe a live background save feature like Google uses, but that is not in there yet.

[EEVblog]

But who is going to risk doing a commercial project on something dependent on their server and them not abandoning it some time in the future?

Plenty of commercial users already do that with AD's online license server.
Someone noted on here they were pretty miffed when the server went down.

[EEVblog]

That's one huge feature of Upverter that I really love: Collaboration. It makes working with another designer halfway across the world so, so easy.

They are aiming to make it much better than upverter in that respect.

[T3sl4co1l]

Fail. If I can't work because my internet connection or their server is down that is completely unacceptable.
What happens if you've spent hours on a design & suddenly can't save it? Is there a way to deal with this situation?
Any paid version would absolutely have to allow standalone use or they won't get any significant sales.

Maybe they'll adopt a system whereby that in the event of the Net going down mid session then the software would save to cache which would allow you to close down the software/PC, and then when you bring it back up again it reconciliates with the server to save. Thats gotta be minumum functionality..........

Ian.

Interesting implications though...

- If they save it locally, it'll be like downloading a video stream: it shows up in your internet cache (or at least, this was true at one time), so you're already downloading it to file, the user just doesn't interact with the file normally.  But it's merely a matter of making a copy before the cache clears.

- If they save it locally, but it's encrypted... who owns it?  I expect most legal jurisdictions would consider that file yours, because it represents your labor.  In which case, encrypting it might even be illegal, because that would be ransomware: they're holding that file's contents from its rightful owner!

- And if it is locally encrypted, how much interest will there be in making backups?  Will it be as simple as copying the file?  Will it be desirable to open that file as well -- in short, circumventing the encryption?  (Depending on their security, it may be easy or hard.  The key may also be updated from time to time, which depends on how often people want to keep cracking it.)  This is generally illegal, but if the file contains user data... is it?

- And if people go to such length as to crack the encryption (if present), is that security representative of much more of Altium's infrastructure?  In other words, is putting that restriction out there, in a massively available program, going to compromise the security of Altium in general?

It seems likely that, to avoid all this crap, they'd simply have it saved online only.  Less vulnerability for them, and more control.  Bad news for users like Mike.

Tim

[EEVblog]

I find it interesting that there's already a definite trend in the poll towards people not being interested at all, and almost no-one who would pay a small amount to have a non-cloud option.
People really have high expectations for "free" these days.

Yep, I agree.
I think if there was a paid option to save and work locally then I think few people would generally have a issue with it. I know I wouldn't, as I'd be looking at some kind of paid version anyway. So this would just be another one of the optional extras I would buy.
They actually already have this in place begging to be used with their app payment model and the ability to trade off features back and forth and get credit on things you aren't using right now.
e.g. don't need off-line work right now, but need 8 layers for a month no problem, just shift your options around.