Over the next couple of years I will be reporting here regarding how my experience with sMath compares to that of the products which it substitute for from my perspective as a 34 year old re-entry electrical engineering student.
Presently, I'm familiar with Matlab (I will not be all caps-ing that products name), and just getting familiar with Mathcad Prime 4.0.
After only using Mathcad Prime 4.0 for two days it hurts my fingers where Smath never did. I'm constantly having to look down at the keyboard to insert operators or subscripts with up to 3 or four key combinations and I think sMath did that much better and more fluidly. For instance subscripts:
sMath: period
Prime: cntrl & -
Although for me, more lines of code I try end up working in Prime 4.0 and that is why I personally need it, because of the time it saves me... although my approach of banging my head against the wall of software by permutating my code instead of asking for help is probably why I wasn't as successful with sMath.
I'm not at all sure that Prime 4.0 is anything but a handicapped Mathcad 15 with a different font. PTC who makes it might not be either. According to google trends PTC is dropping the ball majorly...
The corporation is generally difficult to deal with in my experience. Contacting PTC four times regarding two simple questions was necessary before I felt comfortable paying them. My question was whether the $200 Electrical Engineering pack of 457 worksheets would work with the student edition and if I could get the current student edition, which is now 5.0 in a perpetual student license. They found all manner of dissuading me to pay them, from not forwarding emails, ignoring messages, absurdly useless chat sessions, to my local representative Mr. Julian Lockwood, who invariably misspelled my name, expertly furnished erroneous information regarding his product. It took them two months to get me answers and half of the information provided was downright false. For instance I asked if I could get this stupendously cheap 10 Euro perpetual license of Prime 4.0 in English and if Prime 5.0 was available?
http://store.ptc.com/sto...909&ThemeID=21925700After sending them the link I was told that perpetual licenses aren't offered. Out of fear the perpetual license links would be taken down I bought an English perpetual student license for Prime 3.0, the most recent I could find, from a different link for $105 then got the courage to try the German site for the update which worked. PTC was not at all helpful and in fact Mr. Lockwood told me he was "sorry [I] made the purchase that I did" when I bought Prime 3.0 first first. He continued to say "[t]here is nothing that I or PTC an do for you at this point... we don't provide any refunds"...
The reason I chose sMath first was because I didn't want to get into backwards compatibility issues with a companies software. I like having the confidence that I can open my file in any version of the software without locking myself out to the file on a terminal with an older version of the software. For instance I used the trial version of Mathcad Prime 5.0 for less than 24 hours and everything I did was incompatible with the Prime 4.0 version I bought the next day. I can't even open those files now...
For that reason, and the proficiency of the participants, sMath's forum is fundamentally stronger than the PTC corporations because it is not contaminated by version conflicts. Additionally, people are amazingly eager to help on this forum which another one of the best things about sMath.
My intended use for this type of software is as a CAS and expect to do things at least as easily as in Casio Classpad Manager but in a more sophisticated and capable manner. Prime is less user friendly but more reusable than Casio. At this point Classpad is still my gold standard for usability with respect to the few functions I need regularly... solve, systems of equations, and quick impromptu calculations. They even have this new thing which I have no experience with but the Company might be trying to scale it up into sMath type tool. I know of noone who uses it and Casio's support is wishy washy as well. Mr. Charlie Watson is the companies greatest resource beyond the classpad.
https://classpad.net/usEdited by user 26 August 2018 05:07:39(UTC)
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