kicad-developers team mailing list archive

[Lorenzo Marcantonio <l.marcantonio@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Mon, Apr 15, 2013 at 06:46:38PM -0400, Wayne Stambaugh wrote:
> colors the white text does not show up very well.  That being said,
> a more fundamental question, is the amount of work required to save
> the width of one check box worth the effort?  There is already way
> to hide the layer manager for low resolution devices where space is
> a premium. Assigning an accelerator key to it would probably make it
> more useful. You would probably save more space if you provided a

Fully agree with that. For me the only nuisance is the third button
click for changing colour and I've already proposed my fix. Handling
resize event in a 'smart' way could also 'solve' the problem and allow
both shorter and longer names. At the limit a full collapse would only
show the swatch and checkbox (a tooltip could be used for the layer
name). That wouldn't be a lot of work iif wx has some features (it GTK
that would be nearly trivial).

Talking about accelerators, I found this in real usage of pcbnew;
obviously it's my workflow (I mostly do 2 layer and some 4-6 layers; for
2 layers in practice there is no need to hide stuff):

- First, I use a lot the 'hide all but current copper' function; a key
  could be allocated for it

- Another thing I'd like is keys to show/hide layers like for changing
  them; maybe the same F-keys shifted or something similar.

A for the 'low resolution' I think we should strive for at least
1024x768 or whatever is it's wide counterpart. There are a *lot* of
laptop (even expensive ones:D) running with these specs...

We are *nearly* supporting them. If toolbars were customizable there
would be no issue but I suppose that's a wx limitation. The ideal
solution would be a dual icon set like open/libreoffice (I agree that
the old icons are a little difficult on the eyes at high resolution).
Other with that a little UI rework would solve most issues: I see that
the button actually disappearing are the high contrast (and successives)
and the grid origin button. Really few things... I think that simply
putting the commands on the menu (instead of hidden in a dialog) would
solve this (also *all* the UI guidelines in the world require that the
menus contains the commands from the toolbar). In fact the only thing
inaccessible is the high contrast display (at least there is a key for
that:D)

Other than that I don't see the need for two buttons for the unit change
(the indicator is already on the status bar anyway); a toggle would
suffice; and removing a few separator on the right bar shows every
button (but that's not a problem, anyway)

-- 
Lorenzo Marcantonio
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