On Mon, Jan 26, 2009 at 05:50:15PM -0800, Ben Jackson wrote:
Actually gschem is the best and most intuitive one I've ever used. I really love it, especially the two-key actions. Much easier to remember than obscure combinations of "normal" keys with "modifier" keys. The latter ones are often hard to reach with only one hand on the keyboard, as well. I could use gschem right away - the hard part wasn't using the UI, but getting symbols resp. adding the right attributes to the hand-drawn symbols. But then again, I am not an ordinary user. I'd have a very hard time (and would probably give up really soon) using one of those "modern" mouse-centric tools. Got a demo for some parametric CAD package in use at a company a few years ago - the concept was great (yes, the last time I used CAD was in the 1990s - so it WAS news to me ;) ), but it was completely mouse-controlled (at least by the person doing the demo). That gave me the creeps.They're both pretty bad. There must be something about CAD programs thatMaybe we need a gschem HID for pcb? ;-)leads to wacky user interfaces.
Summary: Be careful when changing the interface "to better suit newbies". Some of them might actually be repelled by the supposedly-better one. One solution might be to offer several alternatives to choose from at first start.
Re. PCB: Tooltips showing the keybindings of non-menu items (i.e. layers and mode buttons) and (less importantly) a way to change them from within the application would be great. Those bindings are buried somewhere in the documentation that wasn't entirely obvious to me - a full table of contents (including subsections) would have helped as well. Yeah, I should just RTFM completely one of these days. :)
CU Sascha -- http://sascha.silbe.org/ http://www.infra-silbe.de/
Attachment:
signature.asc
Description: Digital signature
_______________________________________________ geda-user mailing list geda-user@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx http://www.seul.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/geda-user