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Re: Improving usability of KiCad

 

On Sat, 9 Oct 2010, Dick Hollenbeck wrote:

We are essentially rewriting eeschema very soon.
Any plans going metric on the way? I know it doesn't actuallu matter much, 
but "now or never (tm)". Brainstorming ahead, is the wxWidgets the right 
tool? I remember some previous brainstorming about Qt, even python 
was mentioned for the UI. My (very limited) experience has proven PyQt4 
_very_ usable and also faster than any other common Python GUI toolkit. 
GUI layout tools are in my opinion way better and there is less breakage 
between platforms. On wx(GTK) the layout with labels and textboxes is 
never correct (just look at KiCad on wxGTK vs Windows), but on Qt it's 
completely non issue. Platform nativenes issue was solved some time ago, 
so Qt ought to be as native as wxWidgets. I know the great deal of 
investment for wxWidgets, but sometimes one has to leave old behind. Nokia 
pushing Qt seems to be a good thing as license was relaxed 
LGPL/GPL/commercial and development is ongoing. Qucs and FreeCAD would 
combine with KiCad more seamlessly...
Just to make it clear, I don't want to start any war about which tookit is 
the best or KDE/Gnome/OSX/Win/FLTK/E17... usability battle, just some 
thinking about which toolkit is the best for KiCad and sustainable and 
saving developer time. Especially the graphics, if the problem is already 
solved why it has to be solved again with minor differences? It seems that 
the world is full of unsolved problems, but those who can and will solve 
them are a scarce resource. Let's spend that recource meaningfully. I use 
Gnome on Ubuntu Linux, but vastly prefer Qt as a tool. Qt-clearlooks 
style.
-Vesa



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