There is nothing easier to use than what you already know — that’s simple.

Does DxDesigner offer superior productivity? I believe the answer is a definite “Yes” but obtaining the prerequisite knowledge is not addressed by my statement. Clearly, if Mentor Graphics is to be successful expanding their customer base beyond their current users they really should heed your feedback.

My subtle point is that unless you provide that feedback they will not have the opportunity to improve. (While improving the documentation based on your feedback will not address the learning curve challenges for you, the customer support option could be your tactical solution)

Who knows, maybe their management team is reading your blog and is currently making preparations… There is one way to be certain.

Given that users of DxDesigner are at different stages of knowledge if I were asked whether the priority should be placed on improving the “out of the box” documentation or innovating to provide role & flow based version management I would select the later. No disrespect intended but I have my own agenda.

I am not convinced the challenge is with “evil management” as much as it is with providing technical evolution to meet current designers needs. I will reiterate…. I do think you have made valid points that could cause a priority shift. However, if that priority shift is made it will clearly be made by a bean counter manager to address business objectives… I can’t imagine a software developer would make that choice as they would naturally prefer creating “new functionality” over documenting functionality.

Yes, around here you don’t get the ketchup unless you ask for it. Annoying but I have adjusted to asking for the ketchup at the same time I make my payment (and I do agree that the penny pinching had caused an un-needed behavioral change).

I am under constant pressure to complete my designs faster while at the same time reducing the component and manufacturing costs… seems like everyone is caught in the same economic wave. Heck, my favorite sandwich shop has made a customer satisfaction blunder… they chose to lower the cost and deliver a thinner sandwich when I would have paid more for that toasted piece of heaven I loved (I stopped eating lunch there…. just pissed me off — I did raise the issue to the owner of the chain store I frequent and when I was told it was a corporate decision I made my decision).

Isn’t there a deeper question: what caused the economic upheaval that is driving all of this nickle and dime behavior? Without diving into politics too far I think the root cause is with the bankers and I am all for auditing the Federal Reserve (If there is something worth boiling my blood over, I think that is getting close to the right domain).

Am I a blinded DxDesigner advocate?… I will admit there is a possibility. I am not a young dog and I have used almost every EDA solution available (and some that are no longer available). Maybe I like DxDesigner because “it is what I know” but I believe the answer is deeper…. DxDesigner is not stagnant… it continues to evolve to help meet the productivity, first pass design success and cost control pressures that I am challenged with. The constant innovation has caused a few foul words to spill but at the same time it has saved my hind quarters numerous times.

The reality is that if I were truly acting in my own selfish interests I would not have responded… you might reset priorities away from my innovation requirements. You might have convinced our competitors to stay away from DxDesigner and we would have had another competitive edge.

My solution is very much like the ketchup — When I really need to know and the solution is not obvious I just call customer support.

I stumbled across your blog while I was searching for some tech. tips to help me with a current design. It is unusual to find an engineer with excellent writing skills… rare enough and poignant enough to cause me to pause and respond. I hesitate to cause reflection and a reversal of sentiment (as you might be working for one of our competitors) but I also love a good debate. It’s been fun.

Peace.

Many, many people do use and enjoy DxD… but I remain in the “wholly crap” camp.

Like you, I don’t have time to wade through docs if I can avoid it, but if they are readily available and reasonably well organized and not choked with references to non-existent/non-license enabled/irrelevant or wholly obfuscated rabbit trails to nowhere… we can generally distill ‘meaning’ from raw data.

Still, if a ‘help system’ doesn’t describe the most basic operations of a product, isn’t this more a failure of the of the software producer than a fault of the end user (who admittedly is more comfortable with at least one competing product).

I mean, crikies! Is this a safari into the darkest jungle or an honest business transaction? Do you pay for what you reasonably expect and then get those features, or are you expected to make a lifestyle change that requires re-training and re-education to make use of the product?

Why would any product require a phone-bank of engineers to interpret what should be in the well-indexed documentation… unless they were SCREWING THINGS UP, BIGTIME???
It is a bar of product utility that MG has not met.
I know it CAN be done because it HAS been done, but not by Mentor Graphics!

It is not a value-neutral “feature”, for example, that pin numbers MUST be in upper-case ONLY. Pin names are FORCED into upper case numbers but pin numbers are not, even though it’s a ‘halt and catch fire’ condition!! If it is a REQUIREMENT it should be REQUIRED at time of input, right? Basic ’sanity checking’ of input is missing from the MG product, days are wasted, deadlines blown….

I maintain my skepticism about the value of the MG product over little, basic, canonical things like this.
This is where the external text editor comes in: to fix many hours of component creation in the native “Component Wizard” that DOESN’T force pin numbers to the required upper case.

Thank goodness you knew better! We returning users are given no such guidance until a lot of time is wasted utterly by BAD DOCUMENTATION and BAD PROGRAMMING in the Mentor Graphics product!

Maybe my expectations fpe CAE packages has risen beyond what MG choses to deliver… but in real terms they must either “get it up” or GET OUT OF THE BIZ or just quit their whining: that’s what I’m saying.

A commoditized tool (like a hammer or a CAD/CAM package) should be useful without a “non-help system”, a “SupportNet”, a phone-bank, a training seminar or the interference of a multitiered license system that denies access to reasonable and ordinary functions within the core product as purchased (like viewing CAM outputs without the payment of additional tribute, etc… ‘Oh, you wanted a non-opaque windshield on the car… that’s an up-charge!’).

Yeah, I’ve got 3rd party CAM viewers on my system, but what a PISSANT CORPORATE MOVE IT IS TO CHARGE MORE FOR THAT FEATURE!!! C’mon, just how pathetic can things get? Do the fast-food establishments in your neck of the woods withhold ketchup unless you ask for it? An order for ‘French fries’ implies ketchup, FUCK your little laminated signs to the contrary! I drive around and cut off other customers just to address this ‘corporate policy’ all the time… because it is stupid and it SUCKS!

‘Caveat emptor’, I’m down with that and all but requiring a frigging’ lawyer to scrutinize every aspect of a software license terms is kind of extreme, dontcha think? It strikes me as “bizarre” to think so, but maybe your boss has much deeper pockets than mine.

This is the bone of contention and the challenge that Mentor Graphic has not met:
DESPITE never having used the Altium package before (never even HEARD of Altium, in fact, since I’d been walking the Earth as a Tech Writer for a few years, vagaries of the local economy and all), I was able to to have completed boards for a high-speed multi-channel analog data acquisition system (0.75 inch wide, 17 point something inch diameter, semi-circular, 8-layer boards plotted on a radial grid) in hand and WORKING in less than a month after first use: no phone-bank use, no training seminars, no printed manual required… because most of the software ‘quirks’ and ‘kinks’ made sense!

And seriously: “I do think your comments about the help system must be dead on — or you would not have listed the first 5 false facts”…. Umm, did you parse that statement fully before you typed it?
Likewise: “Of course, to claim that Mentor Graphics is unique in this respect does make this false fact #6″…. I don’t think I’ve ever claimed that Mentor Graphics is the only ball-less corporation foisting inadequate product(s) onto customers, but feel free to provide a quote that says otherwise. I’ll publish it, promise!

Grizz: are you smoking something that I’m not, or, in your zeal to defend mentor Graphics are you just failing to make your point well? Hey, I love you, man… but WTF?

I’m all in: corporations more dedicated to “stockholder return” than “service to customers” are just WRONG and making customers pay (monetarily or temporally) for their “wrong-think” or lack of competence is just plain stupid. Likewise,if they are that lame as to steal from their stockholders the cost of running a phone-room to offset the bullshit nature of their documentation, aren’t the just as worthy of the noose?

While “You can’t fix stupid”, you CAN expose and punish promulgators of “Stupid” to the point that they “learn not to burn” (as in ‘not burning customers’). Hello, Mentor Graphics! Are you understanding the words that are coming out of my mouth??!!!

A simple plan: fire the execs and managers, listen to the engineers and prosper (to paraphrase Mr. Spock). ‘Suits’ make GREAT underwater decor, especially in the coastal waters of the North-West (or so I hear in land-locked Oklahoma).

‘Nit-picking’ (or even calling to corporate attention their lack of adherence to self-evident human interface, documentation, data entry and product usability issues) isn’t my favorite thing to do (hey, I’m spending my off-time on this, after all): I’d prefer a world of well-thought out and delivered product functionality. I could do WITHOUT needless irritation and recursive rework required by DxD.

I’m an ‘if you open a gate, you close it’, ‘if you open a file, write to it then close it’, ‘if you sell a product, you make sure it works well first’ and ‘if it is a data format requirement, you enforce it at time of input or just convert it to the required format automatically’ (like they used to teach in ‘Computer Programming 101′, back in the early ’80s) kind of guy.

Confronted by the “It’s a large pond full of brain-damaged frogs” and/or “Everyone else is delivering substandard products” arguments— I say “BAH! OFF WITH THEIR GENITALIA! All their villages will SUFFER for this INSOLENCE, as a warning to the others!”. Even primitive hunter-gatherers knew to not propagate under-performing livestock. Why should we ’sophisticated’ modern humans forget this lesson?

I’m frequently told that the MG layout editor is much less frustrating than DxD would lead me to expect, but I may never know since for the last week I’ve been having to recursively delete and re-perform basic designs and tasks in DxD. MG’s ignoring of basic programming tenets is a VERY major barrier for me overcome before I can encourage others to adopt their package.

Right now, even if I were heavily pressed by the school ‘Athletic Booster Club’ to upgrade my impression for ‘Mentor Graphics Dx Designer’ to save the Varsity Football program in my district, I’d maybe sign off on a C-/D+ grade (which is officially ‘passing’), but with some serious text in the ‘Teacher Comments” portion of the Report Card. For college level work, I’d say “thanks for trying, but you ignored basic and well-established rules of programming; I’m sure it was an ‘executive decision’ but you are stuck with the ’suck’ for it”. and send a brochure for a local trade school to the parents (no shame in this, not everyone is ‘Shiva, Destroyer of Worlds’). The pin number/pin name filter screw-up (avoidable by conventional wisdom and good programming technique) would merit a “thanks for trying” grade (aren’t you glad I wasn’t at your college?).

I’m ‘cruel but fair’ in this respect and not a shill for any brand of CAE/CAD/CAM: I just want whatever is sold to work per reasonable expectations… and believe strongly that ‘failures to advance’ over ‘N’ consecutive years is a sign that not only is a firm not learning but is either incapable or opposed to learning… or just hooked on screwing the customer & shareholders due to a lack of desire to fulfill their end of the social contract…

“Bring in the guillotines!”

While I would never state that DxDesigner is “bug free” or “perfect” (I have not found that s/w yet…. including WordPress… and I do love WordPress) I will challenge your alleged “facts”.

The only issue I see is that your “facts” are simply wrong:

1) Rotate Component: “Cntrl+Shift+R”

2) I routinely create designs with pins on .1″ grids and no problems.

3) Zoom — mouse wheel, in and out… very natural and I have one of those new fangled mice where the mouse wheel tilts left and right — and the schematic page pans left and right.

4) I have not needed to edit a symbol in a text editor yet, I use the symbol editor. Andy while there are times where I would prefer an “in situ” symbol editor the automatic seeding from DxDesigner to the Symbol Editor and then auto-update from the symbol editor to DxDesigner is extremely productive (no design re-load or refresh).

5) I did loose a design but it was to a disk crash and not the result of some malicious DxDesigner manager’s desire to limit engineering productivity (although, that was my first guess… The disk was on the edge of going out so it was a little tricky to find the root cause). I have been using DxDesigner for years and aside from the disk crash I have not lost a single design.

6) I do think your comments about the help system must be dead on — or you would not have listed the first 5 false facts. Of course, to claim that Mentor Graphics is unique in this respect does make this false fact #6. I suggest picking up the phone and calling Mentor Graphics Customer Support — you would have had all of your answers in less time than it took to write your post.

There are other non-Mentor sources of insight into how to trounce the competition with your incredible design skills and productivity wielding the mighty DxDesigner light-sword…. but I would never suggest Google (or any other search engine).

I always believed that folks who respond to “rant posts” with the “read the manual” acronym are completely missing the point. I have never read a manual, don’t use the help files but I do have that antiquated instrument — the phone — updated with a headset and I dial my trusty customer support engineers and voila — don’t need no stinking manual or training classes. If you had worked with the customer support engineers at Mentor Graphics you would have written a completely different article —- how wonderful it is to find a company who has not outsourced their customer support.

I do understand how frustrating it is to adopt a new tool-set after your tool selection recommendations have been ignored. However, you have chosen one of the most bizarre methods I have seen to date to ask for help. Is this a desperate plea to join the unemployed? There are many thousands of companies — and countless engineers using DxDesigner to create market dominating products today and you are raising your hand and saying “not me”. (I would caution against that approach — there are many very good engineers inhabiting the unemployment ranks due to no fault of their own)

I just did a quick search of the DxDesigner documentation and all of the “answers” were easy to find (well, not the disk crash – data corruption but my boss expects me to have those hardware diagnostic skills — they also did NOT mention that they think their own help system “sucks” but I find that understandable). I think you have walked out onto the thin ice and while I do applaud the vivid imagery and tightly coupled metaphors you might want to head back to shore now.

Normally, I do not respond to anti-DxDesigner rants… I just enjoy the knowledge that my job security is increased with every company who believes that “toys” are superior to hard core engineering tools. I love it when our competitors think they will save a few bucks and leverage these lost cause solutions… they are just giving us the opportunity increase our market share. Of course, I also believe it is not the “tools” it is the creativity, intellect, experience and dedication of the “engineers” that determine competitive success… but I do like to have a sharp axe when cutting down a tree.

I expect this comment will not be published or you will delete it soon as your rant is more emotional than factual. It does not bother me…. the more people you scare off to the “toys” the better it is for those of us who harness the power of DxDesigner.

However, if you have calmed down now and want to contribute your learning experiences to the improvement of Mentor Graphics for the benefit of the larger engineering community… I suggest a quick Google for “Ask Andy Mentor Graphics” and send Mentor Graphics Management some constructive input (How weird is that, Mentor Graphics management openly discussing their business on the web and taking questions from anyone??)

Please check out my new posts at Etching Journey on the results I obtained with the pnp blue process.

In all fairness to puretch, I need to try that resist again with the more rigorous plate preparation technique but the results obtained in this cycle of experimentation are outstanding!

You might have discovered my note on the Journey site. I am now running pnp blue film alongside the Puretch to see what happens.

Maybe I am not cleaning my copper correctly but if I prepare them any better , I won’t have any copper left to etch. =)

dan

Best of luck with your projects, I’ll be watching your blog with interest.

I am enjoying reading your various posts. You are a person of many interests!

I hope that you will stay tuned and help me get past that 6mil barrier before I get blooming and corrosion with my set-up.

I’ll be publishing more info soon on my experiments as well as posting pix of the “Frankenstein” connections.