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Re: gEDA-user: fritzing



Stuart Brorson wrote:
> Hi --
> 
>> What would be fabulous is if gEDA settings could be changed to make
>> our front end look 
>> and feel like fritzing or as is, or as some particular user wanted.
>> Fritzing is probably doing good market research -- getting good feedback
>> from a set of users we alienate with our typical comments of "well,
>> you just handle all 
>> that complexity and stop whining..."
> 
> All the comments about Fritzing vs. gEDA are very true.  It would
> indeed be nice if gEDA (particularly the gschem -> PCB flow) were more
> polished and newbie friendly.
> 
> One major difference between gEDA and Fritzing is that Fritzing is a
> university project receiving sponsorship from various state
> governments in Germany.  That means that they have a paid team who can
> work on the software full time.  I just looked at their website again,
> and it seems that they have a team of 11+ people working on the
> software, including 3 UI specialists.
> 

There is another difference and this is huge: Next to Linux packages 
Fritzing also comes as an install-ready Windows package. We can bitch 
and moan about MS but the fact remains that by not having a ready-to-go 
Windows build gEDA alienates something like 99% of potential users. 
Meaning they won't even kick the tires because they can't. At least if 
these statistics have any merit:

http://blogs.zdnet.com/hardware/?p=2179

Ok, I solved that by running Ubuntu as a Virtual Machine but getting 
this to work well enough was not completely trivial and cannot be 
expected from a college kid or someone who just moved into a university 
dorm.

I know I am going to get some flak now but this is reality. None of my 
clients use Linux on their engineers' computers. Out of more than a 
hundred engineers at clients whom I know well enough on a more personal 
level there is exactly one who runs Mac-OC at home and one hardware 
engineer who runs Linux at home. He didn't know about gEDA until I sent 
him the link ...

[...]

-- 
Regards, Joerg

http://www.analogconsultants.com/



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