Mathcad Plus 6.0/Mac
Shipping Version bugs

Upon receiving the shipping version of Mathcad, I wentthrough the list of bugs I reported in earlier betas. Bugs in bold indicateproblems I consider the most significant and should be fixed in the nextrelease (if Mathsoft ever decides to update the program).

I have categorized my problem reports into three categories:

  • Dragging any of the toolbars causes some buttons to be clicked. For example:

    +------------+
    | B1 B2 B3 * |
    +------------+
    • Use mouse pointer to grab at the 'edge' shown by *
    • Drag toolbar to the left or right. Release mouse button. Quickly move mouse over any palette button.
    • The button will be clicked. (In programmer terms, the mouseUp event is not being detected soon enough.)
  • Copying text in a text region or paragraph and pasting into a Mac word processor only pastes a graphic; the text is not editable. One can convert the clipboard to styled text when receiving a background event.
  • Disabled equations should be color-coded like highlighted equations.
  • Standard Macintosh Page Setup... dialog is not available. The N-up printing features of the StyleWriter and LaserWriter 8.4.X drivers are very desirable when printing long documents for personal/reference use.
  • Double click selects word. Double-click and drag should select subsequent words, but does not. Single-click and drag work fine but selects per pixel, not per character (although selection is correct after the mouse button is released).
  • Format...Number/Equation/Text/Paragraph are not intuitive. The first one (Number) can apply to specific regions, the middle two (Equation/Text) apply to the document as a whole, whereas the last one (Paragraph) is active if a paragraph is selected.

    Document-wide changes are better handled in a (nonexistent) Preferences section/configuration files. The above menu items should specify to selected regions only. The Format...Color...Background/Highlight/Annotation commands don't work (p. 117)
  • A worksheet has to be open before one can link to it. Mathcad should allow links to unopened worksheets, given memory constraints that limits the number of open worksheets.
  • Unable to dock floating windows to edges of screen, except for the Math/Font/Toolbar palettes. Palettes cannot be resized, nor do they have descriptive text on their title bars. Many of the commands on the floating palettes are not available from the menu bar. There should be an option to choose full or short menus. Customizable palettes would also be nice, given the large number of options available.
  • Graph Trace does not interpolate between data points in traces. Having this would be a useful feature to have. Also, updating of display is unusually slow when either the Graph trace or Graph Zoom dialog boxes are open.
  • Page Setup... allows editing Headers or Footers, but once in Headers, Footers can be edited using radio buttons on upper left. A single button for Header/Footer would suffice.
  • File/Open dialog box can be invoked from the following menu commands. Some dialog boxes only have one choice in the file type popup menu (which then serves no useful purpose). It should only be available under the File menu, and minimized at that.
    • File...Open...
    • File...Save (Save As)...
    • File...Load Configuration...
    • File...Save Configuration...
    • File...Associate...
    • View...Animate...Save As...
    • View...Playback...
    • Insert...Worksheet...
    • Insert...Reference...
    • Books...Open Book...
  • Using configuration files is fine, but there should be a way to set preferences via a tabbed dialog box. It can simply be an interface to a routine to modify the (text only) configuration file.
  • When using ctrl or Shift to select equations, icon looks like |_ and is not very visible. Also, Mac drag-and-drop convention is to use option to copy a selection and no modifier keys to move a selection.The above conventions should also apply while selecting/moving/copying regions (p. 61)

    Surprisingly, some of Mathcad's dialog boxes support drag-and-drop. For example, in the find or replace dialog boxes, strings can be dragged to/from the Finder or another application, all except the most important window - the Mathcad document itself.
  • With non-white background colors, Mathcad interferes with the color palettes of other running applications and does not bother to update/refresh the screen properly when sent to the background.
  • One should be able to manipulate the graph elements without having to go through the dialog box. Things like 3D views, line styles, axis/ticks should be visible via a context/popup menu (like Excel or DeltaGraph)
  • Only able to export (via Save As RTF command) text regions, not equation or plot regions. Unsuccessful in importing to: MacWrite Pro, Word 6.0.1, PageMaker 5.0
  • You can only select individual pages to print. One cannot select specific regions to print.
  • When opening a long worksheet, Mathcad returns to the top of the page. It should save the current working position at the time of save.
  • Toolbar and menu bar obscure printing dialog (not the Mathcad one, the MacOS one that shows number of pages spooled).
  • Open a Mathcad file on the Internet. Open a previously saved document (local). Create a text region, enter and select some text. The Insert...Link...New... menu item is blanked out when the only two open windows are the local window and a Mathcad file obtained over the internet (from www.mathsoft.com).
    However, when another local document is opened, the Insert...Link...New... menu item is available, and *both* the local document and the Internet document can be linked to the selected text.
  • The Load From Web... menu item is not available if there are no open windows. This does not make sense, since any document obtained over the Web is displayed in a new window. This menu item should be available at all times.
  • When an attempt to retrieve a document over the Web is aborted (pressing ESC, maybe allow for cmd-. also), the user has to dismiss *three* dialog boxes in a row:
    • Interrupt processing
    • Could not find address (or could not create socket if no connection in place)
    • Unable to obtain *.mcd file/URL.
  • The Associate file dialog box lacks a cancel/OK command. Once Associate/Disassociate is clicked, the box should be dismissed. Alternatively, a Done button can dismiss the box, but the Cancel button should then undo all changes.
  • Since the Format Graph dialog box is large and modal, it keeps obscuring the graph to be formatted. Either make it nonmodal or have it remember its last window position (many users have multiple monitors). It seems that if Mathcad remembers the last selected Format Graph tab, why not the window position also? It's hard to tell when a dialog box is modal and when it is not. Use standard Mac window definitions to let the user know the differences.
  • The buttons at the bottom of the Format Graph dialog boxes for the 3D plots (scatter/bar) aren't the same as the buttons at the bottom of the other Format Graph dialog boxes (2D). There's no reason why they can't be, especially in light of trying to use a macro program like QuicKeys to automate graph formatting.

Summary

Mathcad's math engine is robust and capable, but is hindered by numerous performance and usability problems I've encountered. During the beta test, I would have been more effective if the beta testers had received feedback on some of the problem reports - maybe a Web page showing status and resolution of problems found. This would have reduced duplicate and repeated reports. I was disappointed that the betas could not fix simple problems such as the copy/paste bug, excessive screen repainting, and overall slowness.

I may have been harsh in my reports, but only when compared with other technical and development software I use - Matlab, CodeWarrior, and Mathematica.