kicad-developers team mailing list archive

[Dick Hollenbeck <dick@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

On 08/12/2013 07:00 AM, Tomasz Wlostowski wrote:
> On 08/11/2013 06:39 PM, Dick Hollenbeck wrote:
> 
>>>
>>> I think that these doubt should be cleared thinking on 'what about if we
>>> could have two views on the same board' (which, incidentally, could be
>>> a good feature in the far future)
>>>
>>
>>
>> That is a fairly fundamental decision, sort of like the decision you have to make before
>> you start building:
>>
>> either a house or a boat.
>>
>> With rapid zoom in and out, a competing idea might be to store viewports as bookmarks.
>> This is a combo of zoom and viewport origin, and maybe cursor position also.  With the
>> bookmark you could rapidly BOARD hop.
> This is trivial to implement with the existing VIEW.
>>
>> I like full screen views, so I am less than neutral about multiple views for a BOARD.
> Me too.
>>
>> Schematic editor is a different discussion, there you can argue effectively for a tabbed
>> multisheet frame, but I prefer a full frame view of each sheet.
> IMHO the question is if we should have a possibility of multiple VIEWs 
> of the a single BOARD/schematic sheet. If its only about tabs, I'd say 
> its easier and less invasive to have a separate frame, view and 
> board/sch sheet for each tab. An application that could really take 
> advantage of multiple VIEWs would be some sort of collaborative PCB 
> editor allowing many designers to route the same, big board. But that's 
> far, far future, if ever...



I do that.  In our softplc runtime product multiple developers can work on the same
control program at the same time from various locations over TCP, and an edit that one
developer makes is propagated to other developer's views over TCP.

It gets even more interesting when you understand that the program can actually be
executing while you are editing it.  There is a built in incremental compiler in the
softplc runtime.

They use it to entirely run the largest power plant in the USA.  And about 10 additional
smaller ones.

And anywhere else you might find PLCs in countless industries.

We recently ported it to the beaglebone, and we're doing some I/O boards for the
beaglebone now.


How important is realtime collaboration, vs. git repo collaboration for an EDA?  Or is
that simply a concurrent skype conversation or a form of a meeting using show and tell?

Like I said, I know how to do that.  Same old story, there is know how but no motive.


Dick





> 
> Regards,
> Tom
>