Re: gEDA-user: fritzing

[Brendan Howell <brendan@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi gEDAns,
  I'm one of the developers of Fritzing.  I know I'm coming to this 
thread rather late but I have a few comments and clarifications...

  First, I think some of the initial debate and criticism was based on 
looking at our old (archive.fritzing.org) web site that had a bunch of 
early stuff that is completely obsolete.  This first "proof-of-concept" 
version of Fritzing was written using Java on top of multiple Eclipse 
frameworks and for expediency we hacked up a quick output to Eagle.  
While the demo was cool, it quickly turned into an unpleasant experience 
for coders as we reached the limitations of the GUI framework (not to 
mention the problems of being dependent on proprietary CAD tools).  So, 
last summer we threw all the old code out and started over from scratch.
  We decided to go with Qt for aesthetic as well as technical reasons.  
For us, it makes coding C++ almost as easy as working in a higher level 
language, while still giving us every increment of speed that we want.  
It has support for 90% of what we need without external libs.  Docs are 
great.  It's very portable; we release on 4 platforms with just a few 
ifdefs.  We looked at easily a dozen different GUI frameworks before 
chosing Qt.
  We don't really see Fritzing as competing with the other open 
source/free EDA tools.  Our target audience is largely hobbyists, 
students, designers and artists: essentially, non-engineers. 
  Our long-term goal is to support file interchange with other EDAs, 
especially gEDA and KiCAD so that as users reach the limits of what is 
possible with Fritzing, they can move their project over to more 
professional tools.
  With that in mind, it would be great to collaborate.  I'm currently 
working on a gEDA/PCB footprint importer to take advantage of the great 
library that you guys have.  I also have "export to gEDA" on my list as 
it would be really great to be able to export a netlist that gnetlist 
can understand.
  Please feel free drop in on our forums to give us comments, critique 
and code.  Although we don't use gEDA as a backend, I've learned an 
awful lot by reading your code, docs and discussions.  It's great stuff! 

Brendan Howell
http://fritzing.org


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