kicad-developers team mailing list archive

[Dick Hollenbeck <dick@...>]

The user experience is determined by two factors:

1) _zoom factor_, the ratio of one step to its nearest neighbor steps.

2) full _zoom travel_.


I am not fighting for specific zoom step values, but rather for a 
reasonable A) _zoom factor_ and B) _zoom travel_ since these are what 
control user experience in my opinion.


What have we learned?

A) We know that a zoom factor of 2.0 was too high because this was the 
zoom factor going back 6 months ago, and it is what caused ME to 
complain about it first. 

B) We know that the old zoom travel was not acceptable, I also 
complained about the zoom travel, saying I had work to do that could not 
be done without zooming in closer.

C) We also know that a recent commit, before mine yesterday, had a _zoom 
factor_ that was too low. The drawing speed of zones caused this to be 
unusable. So the zoom factor must be a number greater than 1.0 and less 
than 2.0. I think acceptable values of zoom factor are close to 1.5, 
and maybe as high as 1.7. Values of zoom factor outside this range are 
unlikely to be usable in PCBNEW, from a user experience point of view. 
So bag the oscilloscope idea of 1,2,5, that is hogwash.

D) We know that the zoom factor does not need to be identical between 
steps, that on the "zoomed out, small drawing" end of the spectrum, zoom 
factors can be greater and the user experience is still reasonable. 
The zoom factor on the extreme other end, the closely zoomed in end, may 
also be tolerable to a larger zoom factor than 1.5 to 1.7, although this 
tolerance may not need to be capitalized on.


So after all Wayne's work, I feel we owe it to him and to our users 
(which includes me, since I brought it up) to achieve these goals for 
this release. Otherwise this has all been a waste of time and I will 
be very disappointed.


Please think in terms of user experience, _zoom factor_, and _zoom travel_.


Dick