kicad-developers team mailing list archive

[Adam Wolf <adamwolf@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Henner,

I like both of these ideas.

Adam Wolf

On Sat, Jun 20, 2015 at 6:02 PM, Henner Zeller <h.zeller@xxxxxxx> wrote:

> 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
>
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