Re: gEDA-user: Notes from this evening's Free Dog meeting

[Marvin Dickens <marvindickens@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

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