kicad-developers team mailing list archive

[Fabrizio Tappero <fabrizio.tappero@xxxxxxxxx>]

Hello,
In the past years I have taken care of all KiCad icons with some efforts on
menus renaming etc.

In my humble opinion the usability of KiCad needs to be improved asap,
icons need to be uniformized more and the suggestion of adding labels at
the 8 icons at the bottom is great.

The problem I personally have had in the last years is that sometimes
developers (without any bad intentions) like to change modify icons without
really thinking enough about it. For instance right now out of the 8 main
startup KiCad window icons, the first four have a black pencil that is, in
my opinion, unnecessary and wrongly formatted (size mismatch).

I sometimes try to contribute to these kinds of problems but it is not easy
to continuously correct those mistakes and it takes lots of effort.
Developers change things with all the good intentions and key developers do
take care as much as they can about it but, in my opinion, in such an open
source project, it is not easy to establish who should change what. I am
sure this problem does not only apply to KiCad looks but to code as well.

When icons/looks is changed documentation synch is a massive problem.
People who have taken care of help docs generally tend to do crazy about
it. At least I do.

Hope this helps

Cheers
Fabrizio






On Thu, Jan 1, 2015 at 6:52 PM, Javier Serrano <
javier.serrano.pareja@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> On Sun, Dec 28, 2014 at 2:11 PM, David Perrenoud
> <david.perrenoud@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> > Hello,
> >
> > On the CERN roadmap there is as an item saying "Study ergonomics of
> various
> > commercial/proprietary PCB applications". In order to contribute to
> this, I
> > have put on Dropbox some screenshots of the making of an overly simple
> > circuit in Altium, DipTrace, Eagle, Fritzing, KiCad and some random
> images
> > of the future Circuit Maker from Altium. These screenshots can serve as a
> > basis for future usability improvements:
> >
> https://www.dropbox.com/sh/uaju73itwzo1bwp/AAAIBPxdBOzwIKvZvHzhvbCta?dl=0
> ...
> > For further discussions, should I continue here or create Launchpad bugs
> or
> > blueprints? And is there a usability team I can join (especially for this
> > "wxPython based project manager")?
>
> Hello David,
>
> The CERN roadmap is only useful insofar as it generates ideas which
> then can be taken on by KiCad management and included in the official
> roadmap [1]. I think most of the efforts in the coming months are
> going to be in areas for which there are clear objectives for the
> stable release. I'd like to ask others, Wayne in particular, what
> their position is on opening up this work package now, even if it is
> in principle not material for the next stable release (unless I
> misunderstood something). I can already answer one of your questions
> though: there is no "usability team" I am aware of, and I think at
> some point it would be good for KiCad to have one. Irrespectively of
> what one calls it and the definition of its scope (there was some
> debate about it in the past) I think it would be good to have people
> looking at KiCad with a critical eye and suggesting ways to make the
> user experience -- even :) -- more pleasurable.
>
> Cheers,
>
> Javier
>
> [1]
> http://ci.kicad-pcb.org/job/kicad-doxygen/ws/Documentation/doxygen/html/md_Documentation_development_road-map.html
>
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