kicad-developers team mailing list archive

[Henner Zeller <h.zeller@xxxxxxx>]

On 20 June 2015 at 10:58, Henner Zeller <h.zeller@xxxxxxx> wrote:
> 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.

This second point is addressed in patch
https://github.com/hzeller/kicad/compare/remove-unnecessary-intermediate-step.diff

-h