I am very greatful for KiCAD and the hard work everyone has put into producing it and then giving it away for free. Having worked on large systems that have evolved over time, I have the utmost empathy and respect for those that maintain it as well. Thank you all!
I hope no one has taken any of my comments (or those of anyone else) as disparaging. I was pointing out areas where improvement can be made to ease the learning curve for newbies. Unfortunately my Pascal skills are too rusty to make anything of a contribution at this time to offer much in the way of development help. Now if it were in C/C++...... OK, that's another topic;) Greg ________________________________ From: Robert <[email protected]> To: [email protected] Sent: Tuesday, May 5, 2009 4:58:46 AM Subject: Re: [kicad-users] KiCad regrettably still is history free and not parametric! I don't think you can be that dismissive. The point about kicad and other cad packages is that editing often requires nested actions. Autocad (if I remember correctly) allowed you to prepend a command with ' to indicate command nesting. The modern way to do that is with the context menu, and that is exactly what kicad does. So no, I don't believe that the GUI needs a fundamental rethink. Indeed, I think the context menu method of driving kicad is one of its strengths. Keyboard shortcuts should be available, but firstly that requires learning them and secondly not everyone likes to use them, so you still need a graphical means of doing everything. What could do with some attention is the context menu generation and display, which I suspect is suffering from code evolution. Sometimes it doesn't display what you need, and just occasionally it suffers a blow-out and an error gets displayed instead. Then there's the bolt-on "selection clarification menu"; really that should be integral to the context menu proper (I was told that there's a coding problem to be overcome here). However, we have to remember that kicad is produced by people working in their spare time, and obviously they will want to concentrate on that which is critical. Regards, Robert. Tobias Gogolin wrote: > Well lets agree on the fact that KiCad would benefit from a GUI makeover! > And lets not forget that Autocad is a fossil from DOS ages, it is not > representative of 2009! > > > On Tue, May 5, 2009 at 1:50 AM, Anders Gustafsson < > [email protected]> wrote: > >> "In working with KiCad, I have become frustrated with the user interface as >> well. Perhaps the way KiCad works is the norm for such packages, maybe not. >> If KiCad had an interface that more closely mimicked the generally-accepted >> norms for mouse gestures it would be less frustrating to learn." >> >> Well. It resembles "ordinary" CAD-packages, like AutoCAD where you tend to >> use the keyboard more. >> >> >> >> - Anders Gustafsson >> Engineer, CNE6, ASE >> Pedago, The Aaland Islands (N60 E20) >> www.pedago.fi >> phone +358 18 12060 >> mobile +358 40506 7099 >> fax +358 18 14060 >> >> >> >> >> ------------------------------------ >> >> Please read the Kicad FAQ in the group files section before posting your >> question. >> Please post your bug reports here. They will be picked up by the creator of >> Kicad. >> Please visit http://www.kicadlib.org for details of how to contribute your >> symbols/modules to the kicad library. >> For building Kicad from source and other development questions visit the >> kicad-devel group at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/kicad-develYahoo! >> Groups Links >> >> >> >> > > > > ------------------------------------------------------------------------ > > > No virus found in this incoming message. > Checked by AVG - www.avg.com > Version: 8.5.287 / Virus Database: 270.12.18/2096 - Release Date: 05/04/09 > 17:51:00 > ------------------------------------ Please read the Kicad FAQ in the group files section before posting your question. Please post your bug reports here. They will be picked up by the creator of Kicad. Please visit http://www.kicadlib.org for details of how to contribute your symbols/modules to the kicad library. For building Kicad from source and other development questions visit the kicad-devel group at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/kicad-develYahoo! Groups Links
