Re: gEDA-user: gEDA just hit SlashDotOrg (why live CD wouldn't work)

[Bob Paddock <bob.paddock@xxxxxxxxx>]

On Sun, Aug 2, 2009 at 6:30 PM, evan foss<evanfoss@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> On Sun, Aug 2, 2009 at 1:11 AM, igor2<igor2@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>> On Sat, 1 Aug 2009, evan foss wrote:
>>
>>>You know the mechanical people have a livecd or I think it is dvd now.
>>>Perhaps we should have an electronics live disk of some kind?
>>
>> For a few semesters I was teaching gschem/pcb for undergrads. In the very
>> first semester I tried with live cd (one I built myself) but it didn't
>> work out as good as I expected...
>
> That is a group of people who didn't want to learn something new. I am
> not being anti windows, I just expect students to want to learn.

"Real men program in C" was just posted on Embdded.com

http://www.embedded.com/design/218600142 :

"I learned the quiche-like phrase assigns both a high difficulty
factor to the C language and a certain age group to C programmers. Put
simply, C was too hard for programmers of their [young] generation to
bother mastering."

>> - command line; most of windows users believe if you need to type commands

Most Windows users simply can't type at all. I've seen that far to often
when I'm trying to teach one to use a program. :-(

> Seriously? Do they try to use the same tools for all tasks.

The ones that are good with EMACS will.  Especially with the new Butterfly
command in 23.1. :-)

> How many go home and sharpen pencils with a food processor?

My onion dicier might work better at that task...

> Oh come on. I when I was an undergrad (which ended in May) my program
> insisted we all learn autocad with the funny hotkeys and that is a
> program that working in electronics I will likely never use.

AutoCAD is very valuable in electronics for the correct tasks, like
board dimensions and footprints.

When I was in school I thought I'd never need English, who cares
what you end your sentences with [SIC].  Now years later I find
I'm writing publications for places like CDC/NIOSH, posting messages
like this for many to read etc.  Never Say Never.

> In most GUI's now the mounted file systems come up with icons on the
> desktop. Since you really shouldn't work on files directly on a USB
> stick I don't see the problem with copying them when they are done in
> the GUI.
>
> This could all be solved by making a live USB key with a fat32
> partition to transfer files between windows and linux on.

Booting a LiveCD of any flavor in some companies is grounds for getting
fired.  "Its the IT way or the highway" usually to the detriment of the company
in the long term.

> I think most of your problems were user issues not usability issues.

"Blame the user" doesn't really help in any issue.

"What's important is not that we can conceive the idea, but that when
we actually test it on people you discover it doesn't work... your
intuition is wrong." - Daniel M. Russell (IBM Almaden / Xerox PARC)

There are published user guidelines for GUIs:

"User Experience":
http://developer.apple.com/documentation/UserExperience/index.html
http://developer.apple.com/ue/index.html

"Design Specifications and Guidelines - Visual Design":
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms997619.aspx

"GNOME Human Interface Guidelines":
http://live.gnome.org/UsabilityProject

"GNOME Human Interface Guidelines"
http://library.gnome.org/devel/hig-book/stable/

Those are from the wxWidgets reference I have at hand, I'm sure
there are ones for QT and KDE and most others as well.

> John Dotty made a good point that if the windows users want it let one
> of them maintain it.

I agree, and I've been the most vocal over the years here about it, and keep
trying to get there.  Alas like everyone else here we have day jobs
and other commitments to keep us from doing what we would really
like to be doing.

> This community exists because all of us wanted an
> open source EDA tool. If people really wanted a windows one then where
> are they?

They are at KiCAD http://www.lis.inpg.fr/realise_au_lis/kicad/ ,

 http://www.freepcb.com/  note the links to TinyCAD for schematic,
LTSpice for simulation, and OrCAD Demo (At one time there was a much
older full package at the Yahoogroup I mentioned in the other message)
http://www.freepcb.com/resources.htm ,

AutoTrax http://www.kov.com/ (seems to switch back and forth between
open source and not open source over the years, not sure of the
current state)

I probably could go on without much effort.

> be volunteering to help maintain a windows release.

Maintaining it is far different than getting it to work correctly in
the first place.
I can't say much about gEDA (the schematic part) on Windows as I don't
use it there, but PCB I do use weekly on Windows and it has some
significant problems related
to printing and library management.  One of my Windows printing
patches is in the patch tracker, need to work more on some of the
other related sections.  I've started to think it would be easier just
to start off with wxWidgets from scratch after looking
at what it takes to get PCB to print on Windows as it currently stands
on Windows (I'm spoiled by how easy things are to do with wxWdigets in
comparisons with raw GTK).


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