Cloud Preferences
Altium Designer provides the ability to access your settings through the cloud. Wherever you design, at home, in the office or at a different site, you can work in your preferred environment using the cloud preferences. If you modify a setting in the preferences dialog, change the layout of your panels or create a new custom shortcut for a command, your new settings will be stored and available the next time you sign in.
Accessing the Cloud Preferences
To use the cloud preferences open the preferences dialog (DXP»Preferences). Along the top of the dialog is the Cloud Preferences banner. You will need to sign in before you can enable the cloud preferences. Once signed in, click the link to enable cloud preferences. You can choose to disable cloud preferences at any time, but note that this is a global setting linked to your sign in. It indicates whether you have chosen to use the cloud preferences or not and it is not tied to a specific PC.
After you enable the cloud preferences, you can close the dialog and continue work. When you sign out or close Altium Designer, your settings will be saved on Altium managed servers in the cloud. After signing into Altium Designer on another machine, your settings will be retrieved from the cloud, available for you to apply. Altium Designer will only retrieve and apply your settings from the cloud if they have changed since you last signed in. Your machine's MAC address is used to determine when to retrieve your settings from the cloud.
Applying Your Cloud Preferences
Catching up on some work at home, you run Altium Designer and sign in. Altium Designer will retrieve your settings from the cloud, the settings you last used on your work computer. You will see the following dialog.
Click the Yes button to apply all of the retrieved settings, or click on the link to “Show options page list” to see which options pages are ready to be applied. The list of options pages is similar to the list of pages in the preferences dialog and you can choose which pages to apply. This comes in handy when the Default Locations for your documents and libraries differ between your computer at the office and at home, or if your computers have different monitor configurations you may not want to apply your last Desktop Layout.
Taking Control
You may decide that there are settings you don’t want to access through the cloud. Through the Preferences dialog, you can choose which pages to save to the cloud. A page that can be saved to the cloud shows a cloud icon in the title of the page as in the image below. Notice the checkbox over the cloud icon. It indicates whether the page will be saved to the cloud or not. Click on the cloud icon to change this state.
From a root options page, like the System branch of options, you can select which sub pages to save to the cloud. On the list of sub pages, click on a cloud image to include or exclude an individual page or click on the cloud icon in the header to set the whole branch of pages.
A number of additional options pages have been implemented in Altium Designer Release 10 Beta 4, including:
- System - Projects Panel now supports import and cloud access.
- Data Management - Templates now supports import/export.
- Schematic - Mouse Wheel Configuration now supports import and cloud access.
- Schematic - AutoFocus now supports import and cloud access.
- Schematic - Library AutoZoom now supports import and cloud access.
- Schematic - Break Wire now supports import and cloud access.
- FPGA - General now supports import and cloud access.
- FPGA - Simulation Debugger now supports import and cloud access.
As shown in the image above, the hollow cross icon shows the pages that cannot be saved to the cloud.
Usernames and Passwords
Your cloud preferences are linked to your Altium Account credentials and each user only has access to their own settings. Even so, it should be noted that usernames and passwords will not be saved to the cloud. This covers saved Altium login details as well as your credentials for suppliers and publishing destinations.