On 03/14/2014 03:33 PM, Wayne Stambaugh wrote:
On 03/14/2014 10:24 AM, Adam Wolf wrote:Hi folks,I heartily agree with this. I've been trying to show some Kicad users how to use new features in Kicad, and environment variables is turning out to be a real turn-off for many of them.That's a rather sad statement. Before the advent of the GUI (I know I am showing my age), even the secretary (...)
Hi Wayne,In my humble opinion, it's not a matter of technical competence, but the first impression that Kicad makes on the first-time user. Most people expect software to work more or less out of the box, even the advanced ones (that's why among proprietary tools me & my folks @ CERN prefer Altium over Cadence, despite the latter being much more powerful).
When somebody buys a Mac, the usual reason is it to avoid having to edit config files. I know many extremely competent analog designers who simply use autotrax or old orcad, just because they didn't require any configuration.
The idea of keeping Kicad libs in Github is great, but if the first-time-ever user has to set it up in some system config files or run bash scripts (think of Windows users!), it will ruin his experience (sorry for sounding Steve Jobs-ish...). Eagle, DesignSpark and Altium have libraries working out-of-the box. Why we shouldn't?
My proposal is add a configuration window (see attachment) that appears the first time freshly installed Kicad is launched. What do you think of this approach?
Cheers, Tom
<<attachment: sel_window.jpeg>>
_______________________________________________ Mailing list: https://launchpad.net/~kicad-developers Post to : kicad-developers@lists.launchpad.net Unsubscribe : https://launchpad.net/~kicad-developers More help : https://help.launchpad.net/ListHelp
