On Tue, 2011-05-17 at 20:36 +1000, Russell Shaw wrote:
On 17/05/11 02:44, DJ Delorie wrote:
Hi,
A schematic/pcb editor is not "huge" unless it's done in an inelegant way.
A very first task i would do is create a decent gui for drawing the symbol and
footprint in the schematic/pcb library, and make a decent library browser.
Then i would make a drawing mode so that whatever symbol i click on in the
schematic, will appear under the mouse in the pcb. Likewise, clicking a pcb
symbol hilights it in the schematic.
I'd design everything from the ground up to decent reverse annotations so
that pin and gate swapping in the pcb appears in the schematic. Hierarchical
schematics is a must too.
By serializing all the gui actions internally, undo/redo and scripting is easy
to add.
Creating a schematic and pcb should be done productively within the first
hour of never having used the program, yet have no limitations for power
users.
Everything in geda is 180deg opposite to what i'd do.
gEDA/PCB may be not the ultimate tools, but they work not bad, when you
have learned to use them. (I guess for KiCAD it is similar)
Most other commercial tools, like the popular eagle, or the more than
10k Euro professional tools, needs a long learning period. I was told
that companies consider a 3 month learning period with seminars for
employees when they switch their 10k professionals tools.
EDA design is different from custom office tools!
And an application interface is not bad, just because it is not like
latest Apple/Windows style.
I really would be happy if we can try YOUR EDA suite soon -- but I know
how fast these great projects can fail. Your sentence