PTC Gives Mathcad A Facelift With Prime 1.0

After months of talk, PTC this week released Prime 1.0, the newest generation of the company's engineering calculation software rearchitected to bring the power of Mathcad to engineers with a newly-designed environment tuned for ease-of-use and accessibility.

Sporting a new tasked-based user interface and via its open architecture and easy-to-use live mathematical notation functionality, Mathcad Prime 1.0 lets engineers focus on developing engineering calculations rather than formatting

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design documents. The new user interface aims to help users learn unfamiliar functions and features quickly, while the document-centric calculation environment lets them create detailed design documents that include complex calculations and live standard math notations, using text, images and graphs. Mathcad Prime also presents calculations and other information in a format non-Mathcad users can easily understand, enabling knowledge capture and facilitating in reuse and design verification, according to PTC officials.

The new release helps improve process efficiency by reducing errors and increasing accuracy of results via its support for dynamic units, which carries over throughout all calculations created in the software. The WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) equation editor lets users express problem constraints and solutions in natural math notation, freeing them up to spend less time manipulating and formatting the document.

As promised, Mathcad Prime 1.0 also offers tight integration with other PTC products, including Creo Elements/Pro (formerly Pro/ENGINEER) and Windchill. "The content is captured in a format that is presentable so it is much easier to solve the problem and interpret the engineering intent," says Jake Simpson, senior general manager of PTC's Mathcad Business Unit, in prepared remarks. "The result is good design decisions supported by well-structured and legible documentation."