Altium Circuit Studio Development???

I'm wondering if the release of CS (and also CircuitMaker) in conjunction with Element14 was in reaction to Mentor Designer (and later Maker-Pro release) with Digikey in 2014.  See https://www.edn.com/electronics-products/other/4437730/Mentor-meets-Digikey--low-cost-CAD-results

That is to say, it was less of an effort to compete with Eagle, KiCAD and such.  Since that effort by Mentor seems to have underwhelmed the market maybe Altium has decided to put less attention on CS.

It isn't surprising that discussions with Altium sales people about CS gets the ghost treatment.  They have no financial stake.

tarribred61  wrote:

It isn't surprising that discussions with Altium sales people about CS gets the ghost treatment.  They have no financial stake.

Sales people I agree on, but IMHO Altium as a company might hurt longer term prospects for conversion of CS customers in to full AD seats, either because us "small" businesses grow or we end up somewhere influencing CAD decisions (though in all honesty having neen though it previously the latter is such a complex issue that is many times dominated by what was used in the past and the hit from training/learning a new tool).  Or Eagle comes out with a AD importer that does a reasonable job and we all decide to take the pain now rather than putting more designs in to a dead tool.

I don't want to jump ship; the features CS has work well enough for now. Though it crashes frequently I have not lost any work because of that; just time lost to watching the crash progress bar inch across the screen.

Lack of (useful) support for basic things like panels, pick and place, design variants, and library/part revision control are wearing on me. I assume that other packages my solve those issues they probably have some other problem(s) that would be equally annoying.

Assuming (parts of?) the same code base is powering AD and CS the crashes to bother me - is AD that flaky too?  No effort to fix the crashes. Software QA is tough, but it can't be ignored if you're making products that businesses rely on.

My annual renewal comes up in Jan. I can't see paying that under current circumstances. OTOH if Altium provided some concrete plans/deliverables schedule I would have no issue at all renewing.

Call me a conspiracy theorist if you like but...

Element14 provided support (in this forum) for Circuit Studio, thanks in large part to Mr Peter Barnard.  It seems inconceivable that E14 did this out of the kindness of its corporate heart, presumably Altium provided some kind of incentive.  I would be difficult to believe that E14 would choose to dispense with Mr Barnard's services unless Altium had withdrawn whatever incentive was in place.  In other words, Peter's departure equates to Altium no longer supporting Circuit Studio.

If anyone at Altium or E14 would like to confirm or deny then I'd love to hear, as I'm sure would many others in this forum.

The situation is clear.

Look on how thin the updates progressively were until the last one who was just one fix. Given that if someone wanted it, they did not had to create new code, they only had to port or copy/paste and adapt a bit to fit, from the old Altium Designer code that was used as body parts donor for Circuit Studio.

Then man who tried to fix things around, and had more info than us, left.

What more is needed to realize what a dead end is?

So I have been pushing for some more information from element14 and Altium and got a reply which sounds promising (from element14 APAC Technical):

There's definitely a major CircuitStudio version coming in in the future, and work is being done on it, but it's at that difficult stage where we're not given a definite time frame.
The hold up for this is that they're doing a lot of work on the platform and user interface for both CircuitStudio and CircuitMaker to bring them more up to date and more in alignment with Altium Designer (which is a moving target while AD20 is being finalised) and for various reasons the project timeline has slipped more than expected.

I have asked if they can pass on to Altium how beneficial a brief update to the community would be, so we'll see if anything comes through. For me this response is a big relief, provided it is accurate - we will see I suppose.

Well that's encouraging to hear, thanks Jeremy.

Thank you for the update, but I am not sure if I should hold my breath waiting for the next release :-)

I seem to recall that last year a similar comment was made that once AD19 was out, a significant update to CS would be delivered. In the end I think we got 1.5/1.5.1 (and later 1.5.2 once everyone complained about the Digi-Key breakage).

The comments from the Altium seem to indicate the problem is that they have 2 or three separate codebases - and that keeping them all updated is too much work for the available staff.

mc6800, agreed. If they really have done a 'hard work' and they really cared about the user feedback, at the least we may have seen some beta coming out, like they do for AD.

The latest updates where a joke, most likely just copy/paste of old code blocks from AD and perhaps a few new lines thrown here and there to make everything fit. So ... what hard work? Bugs they kept there, they are .... precious

When did Peter Barnard get canned?  Why?  Who is the new Peter Barnard that we can mention on this thread to get updates?

It was a couple of months ago.  He said that he had been made redundant, which means that his position ceased to exist.  In other words, there is no new Peter Barnard.