kicad-developers team mailing list archive

[Henner Zeller <h.zeller@xxxxxxx>]

Hi,
So I know we're about about get ready for the stable release, but
there are two things that are possibly low-hanging fruit usability
improvements, that we might consider.

A lot of usability problems I run into are a series of modal dialogs I
have to go through for common tasks, this addresses the ones that
annoy me the most.

I am happy to help working on the implementation on at least on of
them if the consensus is that it make sense before the stable release.
I personally think it does ...

== Exporting Netlist. ==

Exporting a netlist is pretty involved right now
  - Press 'export Netlist button'
  - Get a modal dialog to choose if I want pcbnew format or three
others I usually don't care about unless I want to export something.
So just pressing the [Generate] button
  - Get _another_ modal dialog that asks me the filename to save it
as. Which _maybe_ makes sense when I choose one of the export options,
but not when I am in the workflow of getting a netlist out to be used
in pcbnew.

So I suggest
  - Have the 'export Netlist button' just export the netlist in kicad
format the default $(schematic-name).net filename. Single button press
for the common task. Down from three actions to one. The status
message should just indicate that it save the net file with number of
nets (right now, it only shows number of nets)

   - Have the current workflow in the menu as 'Export Netlist...' or something

== Annotation while exporting Netlist ==

When exporting the netlist, and not everything is annotated, the
workflow currently is as follows
  1) Press annotation button, press generate, press save (three steps,
that would now be one step if above is implemented)
  2) kicad notices that not everything is annotated and pops up a
modal dialog on top of the kicad control application (for some reason,
not on the eeschema), telling that items are not annotated and if I
would like to do that. Select 'Yes'.
  3) Then the annotation dialog pops up.

I suggest to leave out the intermediate step and directly open the
annotation dialog but with the additional message on top. This cuts
out one click, and the distracting fact that the previous window
popped up at a very different place on the screen.

What do you think ?

-h