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Re: OSX Installer debate

 

On Mon, 13 Sep 2010, Martijn Kuipers wrote:

On Sep 13, 2010, at 18:42 PM, Jerry Jacobs wrote:
Also there are still some odd things when using Kicad on OSX for example
the viewport is damn slow of PCBnew. But it is usable and functional.
This is probably due to the fact that the cocoa-port of wxWidgets is not yet complete. Will try to look into it, time permitting.
Before barking at the wxWidgets, it may be of value to look at KiCad 
drawing code. The drawing is damn slow on every platform that does 
compositing and buffering properly -> OSX and Win upwards Vista. On linux 
it depends on everything, but proper buffering is not ususally done and 
the flicker is very annoying. Some performance improvements are on the way 
from Brian F. Biduloc and kicad-gal from Thorsten. I have no experience or 
skills to implement these, but from the tests it's evident there is some 
fondamental mismatch between KiCad drawing code and current graphics 
technologies. With new vector font the drawing problems begin to show even 
on schematics with lots of text (vertices).
My main platform is Linux, so there may be some pessimism regarding 
graphics ;) For example Freeroute on IcedTea runs really fine as long as 
the window is minimized, but saturates X as soon as something needs to be 
drawn. Sun Java works _very_ much better, even though it probably does all 
drawing on the cpu.
If you find something that makes KiCad on OSX work well, it probably helps 
on every platform.
-Vesa



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