Maple Flow 2025 2

[271828]

The previous threat on Maple Flow has been closed by now.

My understanding is Maple Flow 2025 is a significant improvement over 2024, which I tried last year. My main complaints had to do with very slow and clunky keyboard/mouse operations to do simple things. Working in Maple Flow 2024 wore me out. It also had some catastrophic crashes, with lost data. LOL

Does anybody have experience with Maple Flow 2025? I'm wondering if it has been improved, and if so, by how much. If it is a lot better, I'd be interested in giving it another try.

 

[robertdyas1972]

Before retirement, I was asked what we should do with Mathcad 15 (get Prime or move to something else). After trying it out, I recommended that we swap to Maple Flow 2024. I didn't see any a significant amount of crashes or corruption during teh evaluation (some but that was fixed with a bug fix), but perhaps our usage profile is different. Since I'm no longer gainfully employed, I don't use Maple Flow or Mathcad anymore, but perhaps I'll play about with a trial of the latest version of Mapleflow 2025 and Mathcad Prime 11 (retirement gives me longer recess breaks between my naps). Perhaps if you try as well, we can compare notes.

 

[271828]

It has been a bit over a year since I evaluated Maple Flow. My main issues were clunky keyboard and mouse operations. I remember it was a pain to add units and subscripts.

Maple could probably win my business by using . to make a subscript like MC used to do. With MCP, the shortcut is the idiotic Ctrl -. We do that a million times, and I'd rather not get carpal tunnel. I have had my left wrist starting to ache by the end of a work day more than once. LOL

There were some alignment issues also.

Creating a function was much more difficult than with Mathcad.

I had more than one worksheet that locked up, but I don't remember exactly how it behaved. There was no way to recover the worksheet. Maple's guy tried to help, which I appreciate, but he was not able to resolve the problem. At that point, I gave up.

It would be great if they have gotten their act together and can give MC some competition!

 

[robertdyas1972]

Yesterday I got trials of Mathcad Prime 11 and Maple Flow 2025, so this is a mini review from someone who doesn't have any skin in the game anymore This is all coming from a retired Mathcad 15 user who was considered the superuser (although all that meant was that I read the manual and browsed the old collaboratory)

General
==========================
Overall, Maple Flow isn't Mathcad 15. If you're conjoined at the hip to Mathcad 15, then Mathcad Prime is your path of least usability disonance. But you have to live with paying every year. That might work for you, bt not for me.
Over two days of doing the same stuff in both, I didn't have a crash in either. But I don't drive "off road"

What Mathcad Prime does better
========================
Mathcad Prime has the edge in units (type the unit after the number). (In Maple Flow , you need to click on a unit from teh palette or insert a units placeholder with a keyboard shortcut then type the unit. Clunky. That hasn't changed)
"Feels less weighty/complex

What Maple Flow does better
=======================
Some really nice features: Variable tracking. contents table, equation hiding
Moving math around is easier, click anywhere on an equation, hold the mouse button and drag. This is certifiably more diffiocult in Prime (you have to position the mouse over the border, then drag)
The engineering math stuff is deeper, if you're into that sort of thing. Also thermo data sets built
Format scientific notation with x for multiplication e.g. 2 x 10(-3). I can't find how to do that in Prime.

What I didn't like/general
========================
Mathcad:
Plotting is done in the chart component or a native plot. Two different "apps". Don't give me two ways of doing the same thing. I don't swear much (I was raised presbytarian), but heavens to betsy that's bad design
Subscripts are not a period. It's holding down the shift key then pressing the underscore two times
I hate subscriptions, I really do. That's the single major reason why I recommended Maple Flow over Prime when i was working

Maple Flow:
The Maple Flow Mathcad 15 converter doesn't convert as much as Mathcad Prime Mathcad 15 converter but it might be enough
Subscripts are ctrl+--

 

[IRstuff]

Mathcad Prime 11

Wow, 2 major revs since I last looked!

I couldn't get the 30-day trial to work, but I would think the chart component was added to have compatibility with Excel, since that was always the downside to OG Mathcad, like M15; its graphs were woefully antiquated. While MP11's native charting is better, its functionality and formatting is still pretty limited, so something with the functionality and formatting of Excel's charts would be a plus, in my view