CAMBRIDGE, Mass.--Nov. 29, 2000--MathSoft, Inc. (NASDAQ:MATH), today announced the release of Mathcad® 2001, a major new version of the most widely used software application for applying mathematics. This release offers high performance, new development tools, complete simulation capabilities, and full support of MathML (Mathematical Mark-up Language), the first XML standard to be approved by the World Wide Web Consortium.
"We designed Mathcad 2001 to meet the time-to-market and productivity needs of our customers and to help them fully leverage the Internet," said Chris Randles, general manager and senior vice president of the Engineering and Education Products Division. "Mathcad 2001 is a seminal release that will strengthen our leadership position in engineering and technical markets."
"Mathcad 2001 is a powerful asset for all stages of the engineering process," said David Knapp, optical design engineer at Raytheon. "From first order layout to hardware test data analysis, this release is easy to work with, powerful in functionality and synergistic with other design tools."
The Mathcad 2001 release focuses on four strategic areas: improved performance and expanded functionality, improved compatibility and interoperability, enhanced web publishing and documentation capabilities, and new application development tools.
Improved Compatibility and Interoperability
Mathcad 2001 supports the broad range of tools engineers commonly use in their work. This version is designed to serve as the centerpiece of the engineering desktop, providing a useful, highly integrated platform that lets engineers build projects using Mathcad and other applications. Mathcad 2001 is compatible with the Microsoft Office Suite, and readily interoperates with most of the common engineering tools, including Excel, Visio® 2000, AutoCAD® 2000 and MATLAB®. In addition, this release of Mathcad allows for real-time data acquisition from National Instruments analog I/O boards. Mathcad 2001 makes it easy to integrate Mathcad solutions and functionality into large projects spread across different applications, and then save them within a common document format.
Highlights include:
New Mathcad add-in for Visio, and enhanced add-ins for AutoCAD and Excel
Real-time data acquisition from National Instruments analog I/O boards for prototyping and testing
A new ODBC component, supporting read access to ODBC-compliant databases, including Access and FoxPro
A new picture component for image manipulation
WAV file support for reading audio files
Improved Performance and Expanded Functionality
Mathcad 2001 users will benefit from speed improvements, improved memory management, important Windows operating system and interface enhancements, and newly integrated modeling and simulation functionality fueled by VisSim LE from Visual Solutions.
Highlights include:
New high-performance calculation engine
Improved memory management and higher reliability
New analysis for region dependencies
New modeling and simulation module for prototyping and testing dynamic systems
Greater flexibility in the use of units within programs and other constructs
Menu selection for online product updates
A new Web site located at www.mathcad.com that provides personalized, additional resources and downloadable tools for users and organizations
Enhanced Web Publishing and Documentation Capabilities
With this set of improvements, MathSoft increases Mathcad's competitive advantage in engineering documentation. Mathcad's self-documenting nature and real math notation uniquely support the communication of technical information. The highlight of these improvements is Mathcad 2001's bi-directional support of MathML, allowing users to save worksheets in MathML format as well as read MathML files back into Mathcad as active documents. In combination with IBM's techexplorer, Mathcad is the first to fully support both the presentation and semantic standards of MathML. Applying math and communicating math on the Web becomes seamless for users of Mathcad 2001.
Highlights include:
Bi-directional HTML support for reading and writing Web-based math documents in HTML with MathML
An enhanced HTML/MathML file format that encodes worksheet logic
Inclusion of IBM's techexplorer(TM) Hypermedia Browser, Professional Edition, for rendering and manipulating MathML within your browser
New authoring features for table of contents and index creation as well as region tags and region-to-region hyperlinking
New Application Development Tools
With the addition of the component Software Development Kit (SDK), Mathcad 2001 provides new tools that allow organizations to create their own solutions based on Mathcad. The component SDK lets users integrate Mathcad with other applications, delivering a superior level of extensibility. Most notably, these tools let users create their own custom components from OLE and COM objects.
Highlights include:
A new Software Development Kit for building custom Mathcad components
Enhanced scriptable object components enable users to package an entire component and refine it with fixed settings for easy distribution and reuse
Native Windows control components for buttons and check boxes
Comprehensive Developer's Reference documenting all details for building components for Mathcad as well as using Mathcad in other applications