Stuart Brorson wrote: > Hi -- > >> What would be fabulous is if gEDA settings could be changed to make >> our front end look >> and feel like fritzing or as is, or as some particular user wanted. >> Fritzing is probably doing good market research -- getting good feedback >> from a set of users we alienate with our typical comments of "well, >> you just handle all >> that complexity and stop whining..." > > All the comments about Fritzing vs. gEDA are very true. It would > indeed be nice if gEDA (particularly the gschem -> PCB flow) were more > polished and newbie friendly. > > One major difference between gEDA and Fritzing is that Fritzing is a > university project receiving sponsorship from various state > governments in Germany. That means that they have a paid team who can > work on the software full time. I just looked at their website again, > and it seems that they have a team of 11+ people working on the > software, including 3 UI specialists. >
There is another difference and this is huge: Next to Linux packages Fritzing also comes as an install-ready Windows package. We can bitch and moan about MS but the fact remains that by not having a ready-to-go Windows build gEDA alienates something like 99% of potential users. Meaning they won't even kick the tires because they can't. At least if these statistics have any merit: http://blogs.zdnet.com/hardware/?p=2179 Ok, I solved that by running Ubuntu as a Virtual Machine but getting this to work well enough was not completely trivial and cannot be expected from a college kid or someone who just moved into a university dorm. I know I am going to get some flak now but this is reality. None of my clients use Linux on their engineers' computers. Out of more than a hundred engineers at clients whom I know well enough on a more personal level there is exactly one who runs Mac-OC at home and one hardware engineer who runs Linux at home. He didn't know about gEDA until I sent him the link ... [...] -- Regards, Joerg http://www.analogconsultants.com/ _______________________________________________ geda-user mailing list geda-user@moria.seul.org http://www.seul.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/geda-user