The May update to Upverter is now live. This update represents a significant milestone that brings a number of important new capabilities and enhancements to users. In addition to major infrastructure work, it brings true 3D design, fast and beautiful graphics rendering, PCB capabilities, and a vastly improved project gallery which are among the changes we are confident users will be excited to find. You can read more about Upverter’s May update in this blog post from our R&D team, but what I’d like to provide is an update on Altium’s vision for Upverter.
When Altium acquired Upverter in 2017, it was with the intent to bring the power of desktop CAD and combine it with the lightweight, collaborative capabilities of a true, native cloud application. Upverter is fundamentally a new kind of PCB design platform, created to support users who are native to the world of online apps and community based sharing and collaboration. A new breed of PCB design tool for a new breed of users who want easy to use, easy to access, collaborative, powerful tools that help to turn their ideas into real products.
Upverter is a pure cloud solution for PCB design, making collaboration natural and effortless. By nature it’s easily accessible, requiring only a web browser to use. Altium will keep Upverter true to these fundamental characteristics – collaborative and accessible – now and in the future. Over time, leveraging and building upon the modular design concepts pioneered by solutions like Gumstix Gepetto, Upverter will also make it possible to create real, working electronics even for those with limited or no experience in PCB design.
Simplicity and ease of use won’t come at the expense of capability, however. We’ll continue to make Upverter more functional, bringing over powerful capabilities and features from our industry leading desktop PCB solutions. And while the user types may be different, we’ll ensure that Upverter will be able to share design content with those more traditional desktop design applications, particularly CircuitMaker.
One more thing that I would like to say, is about our previous communication related to merging of Upverter and CircuitMaker. While we still believe that Upverter and CircuitMaker are closely connected, we see them remaining as unique products as each offers a unique set of capabilities that would be compromised if the two products were to be fully merged.
Our vision for Upverter and CircuitMaker has evolved and can best be explained by considering how Google Docs and Microsoft Word can share documents. Microsoft Office file types are already compatible with G-Suite and can be uploaded, downloaded, stored, viewed, and shared within the interface. It can also be done in reverse. Simply download a Google Doc to your computer and open it in Microsoft Word as you would any document.
They are not merged as a single product, and with good reason. Microsoft Word has more advanced capabilities than Google Docs – for those who need them. And as a native cloud application, Google Docs is more accessible, and natural for collaboration (no setup required). In many businesses and homes, around the world, users choose to use one or the other based on what’s most important to them, and yet both are used within the same places and documents can be shared between them. That’s the same way we see Upverter and CircuitMaker working together.
This latest update is the first of a series towards the realization of a powerful, collaborative, and accessible platform for the democratization of electronic design or in other words, “PCB Design For Anyone and Everyone” – so stay tuned, because we’re just getting started.
Ted Pawela – Chief Operating Officer, Altium
Upverter Blog 