Thursday, February 24, 2011

We have released Altium Designer 1O and AltiumLive!

It’s been anticipated for some time: we are now shipping Altium Designer 10 and AltiumLive.

We will kick off the process of getting everyone with a current Subscription contract on to Altium Designer 10, and into AltiumLive, as quickly as we possibly can.

To say that we are excited by this moment is an understatement! To say that we are slightly relieved finally to release Altium Designer 10 and AltiumLive is also probably true!

We appreciate everyone’s interest, patience, and the dynamic discussions that have taken place about what we’ve had planned.

AltiumLive is the new ecosystem for professional electronics designers. It’s the new access point for Altium Designer. And, it’s the place where we will be delivering design content under subscription.

Over the coming days you will receive an email invitation from us which will give you a unique activation link for AltiumLive.

All you need to do is step through the activation process, choose your AltiumLive plan and log into AltiumLive. If you have any issues during the activation process, use the cool new LiveChat feature - one of the Altium team will be at the other end!

This Altium Designer forum will continue for now, until we complete the roll-out of AltiumLive to all of our customers. However, the new Forums in AltiumLive will also be active. We will be monitoring both through the switch over, and merge them once the roll-out is complete (and we’ll let you know when we do this, too).

The current altium.com website will also remain live until the roll-out is complete. You can take a look at http://www.live.altium.com/ and browse the altium.com web pages. You will not be able to sign in until you have been through the activation process.

Here are just some of the highlights of AltiumLive:

  • Software - this section of AltiumLive contains links to download Altium Designer and our other applications.
  • Content - check out our new Content Vaults that store our qualified, released, ready-to-use design entities, from the components through to loaded boards. More vaults will be added in the future. This is how content will be provided as updates from now on, to users on the new Subscriber Plan.
  • Subscriptions - three new AltiumLive membership plans. If you’re currently on Altium Subscription, you automatically become a member of the new Subscriber Plan with continuity of benefits, and some new ones too.
  • Rewards - you will notice that we have a new rewards system which is our AltiumLive community currency. Your points are part of your AltiumLive membership and can be used and accumulated through your actions in AltiumLive's Forum, BugCrunch, and Blog.
  • BugCrunch - this is where you can directly influence the development of Altium software, the place where you can log those issues that you know about. But don’t just report them - nominate reports that others have logged, and vote for the ones that you want to see crunched!

There is so much more we could tell you, but what we would really like you to do is activate your account and explore. So keep an eye out for your AltiumLive activation link. It will be in your inbox soon.