On Friday 05 August 2005 07:57 am, Stuart Brorson wrote:
> > I've been giving a look to Kicad, and have a few things to say about the > > features that it has, and PCB/gaf does not. ----- Pretty big snip ------ Hello Everybody, Due to the illness (Cancer) my wife has had, I have not posted to this list in months. This last week, she was given good news - Remission. Our fingers are crossed... During this time, I have read every mail with interest and have enjoyed them all. This thread is not of the normal gEDA genera and deals with gEDA alternatives... I've played around with Kicad several times during the last year. I've installed from both source and rpm's. The build from source is not that bad - I got it right the first time I tried. Naturally, rpm installation is a breeze. The UI is all eye candy and looks really nice - WXWidgets always looks good regardless of platform. Anyway, here is my take regarding Kicad: WXWidgets always looks great. Kicad is no exception. Even so, The UI in Kicad is unintuitive. Some pull down menus require you to drill down into multiple sub menus to get to things that should be accessable with a maximum of three clicks. The componet selection menu in Kicad is a good example of this. In essence, the program is constructed using MS Windows style navigation which means that using hot keys to make things happen is unruly due. In fact, some key strokes are implimented *twice* - You may or may not get the desired result using hot keys. This type of UI implimentation creates an environment where I am forced to behave like a mouse monkey and in the process I am distracted from the design process. The schematic capture program crashes if you use it and keep it up for a long time (Read several hours of use). This is true for both source rpm installations. Therefore, if your going to Kicad, save your work often. There are not multiple undo levels. I don't know about everybody else, but I need this to fix wacky things I sometimes do :) Even though I've played around with the program for about a year, I have still not figured out how to back annotate. The implimentation/organization of the componet library is Babylon. Componets are stored in multiple subdirectories and are grouped in a non-logical fashion that does not make sense (At least, to me). I don't know if simulation is feasible using the output from the schematic capture module. I never got that far - The UI aggravated me to much to pursue it. I've probably played with it a total of 9 or 10 hours. I think that Kicad is appealing to the eye, but I don't think it's usable for anything other than the most simple of designs. Best regards Marvin
