kicad-developers team mailing list archive

[Fabrizio Tappero <fabrizio.tappero@xxxxxxxxx>]

Hello,

About 2 years have passed since KiCad got its new look with the 26px
icons. At that time approx 400 icons had to be redrawn/resized/reused
etc. It was a lot of fun!

I'd like to propose a new round of changes to give to KiCad a new
polished look so that we can have the best looking EDA tool in the
world!!

Before any further do I'd like to ask what people think about some issues:

1) 400 icons are hard to manage and maintain. I would warmly propose
to drop all icons in all drop-down menus. The use of icons there is a
little bit old style and not really used any longer in modern GUI
design.

2) I every now and then hear about people wanting smaller icons, maybe
large icons, movable icon toolbars, toolbars that re-size with the
screen size. What do we feel about that?

3) monitor pixel density (pixes per cm) in slowly increasing, this
means that what was big icon two years ago now is a small icon. Do we
want more than one size of icons.

4) Is there any input from OS X users? OS X is known to be a prettier
place, would be great to aim at getting there.

5) looking at the looks of other PBC CAD tools what can we change to
make KiCad better looking? For instance do we think gEDA/whatever has
a better appearance? What can we copy? Where can we get inspiration
from:
http://chitlesh.fedorapeople.org/FEL/images/pcb.png
http://www.expresspcb.com/GSoftware/SShotExpressPCB_3.gif
http://www.printedcircuitsboards.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/04/osmond-pcb-design-software.gif
http://www.diptrace.com/img/dpict1_l.gif
http://www.ianstedman.co.uk/Technical/PCBs_and_Eagle_CAD/Eagle_CAD_fill_isolate.png
http://masalaboratory.c.blog.so-net.ne.jp/_images/blog/_c23/masalaboratory/olimex_pcbcad1.png?c=a1

In my opinion the appearance and user friendliness of the KiCad GUI is
good but not great. Hence this e-mail

6) Big topic but.. what do we think about tabs:
http://morphesys.com/images/Portfolio/CAD/pcb4.jpg

7) some icons are quite mysterious and the association between what
they do and how they look is probably known only to the guy who made
it. Which icons are those?

8) is there an amazing PCB CAD (or graphic software) out there that
has amazing icons? Any futuristic look anybody has in mind?


Any suggestion is welcome.
Cheers
Fabrizio