Re: gEDA-user: gEDA just hit SlashDotOrg (why live CD wouldn't work)
Hi Tibor and all, On Sun, 2009-08-02 at 07:11 +0200, igor2 wrote: On Sat, 1 Aug 2009, evan foss wrote: You know the mechanical people have a livecd or I think it is dvd now. Perhaps we should have an electronics live disk of some kind? For a few semesters I was teaching gschem/pcb for undergrads. In the very first semester I tried with live cd (one I built myself) but it didn't work out as good as I expected. Reasons for this, in my opinion, are little issues: some seemingly unimportant convention of windows that windows users are so got used to that they do not want to switch to anything else, even if what they are currently using is the worst possible way of doing that thing. Some examples (and possible solutions): - window manager; there are ways to make the live cd run a very similar window manager that windows has, but it will never be the same. Any little difference will annoy windows users. - command line; most of windows users believe if you need to type commands or you see a prompt, that's the sign you are doing something wrong. On this, xgsch2pcb helped a lot but... - ... but these are separate programs, tools are not integrated, omg, this will be very complicated how could i ever learn this? Really, this was one of the big surprises for my students, that doing different tasks can be best achieved by using different tools. And this is not even about hjaving back annotation, it's purely about having everything in one big window. I am rather sure if anyone would come up with a tool that integrates xgsch2pcb, gschem and pcb into a single window with tabs, these users won't ever notice they are separate programs even if mouse commands are different in each window. ... more stuff deleted here Here is my EUR 0.02 on the subject: I think Fritzing is a better suited app for the undergrad windoze peoples. With Fritzing they can have a schematic, breadboard and final proto pcb, all in one window with tabs, using combined parts, containing symbol, footprint and breadboard part artwork. Add a toporouter for the pcb part and you have outdone most of the competition. The concept is very appealing, maybe someday a gFritzing port will be made :) OTOH, It is a single type of workflow, no simulation or deviation possible. Kind regards, Bert Timmerman. ___ geda-user mailing list geda-user@moria.seul.org http://www.seul.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/geda-user
Re: gEDA-user: gEDA just hit SlashDotOrg (why live CD wouldn't work)
Kai-Martin Knaak wrote: On Sun, 02 Aug 2009 18:30:54 -0400, evan foss wrote: If people really wanted a windows one then where are they? In the kicad user group? Hanging out in eagle.support.eng? Yes and yes :-) Note, that the vast majority of users don't demand better software. They just take, what is there. If it doesn't fit their needs, they use something else. Exactamente. For most folks CAD is only a tool, just like the table saw, the planer and the drill press are for them when they do wood working on Saturdays. Whether we like it or not, that's the way most engineers think about this. WRT to simulation my impression is that this field has basically been taken over by LTSpice, for circuit level designers almost completely. -- Regards, Joerg http://www.analogconsultants.com/ gmail domain blocked because of excessive spam. Use another domain or send PM. ___ geda-user mailing list geda-user@moria.seul.org http://www.seul.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/geda-user
Re: gEDA-user: gEDA just hit SlashDotOrg (why live CD wouldn't work)
igor2 wrote: Conclusion: I think a pure live CD won't help much. Something that integrates better in the windows environment, and where integration is not possible, something that looks and acts exactly the same way (even if that's stupid and slow) is necessary to convience majority of windows users to even consider gEDA. My personal opinion is that different software should do different things. Having 10 different cads looking exactly the same, doing exactly the same things is not very useful. I think gEDA's place is not on the windows desktop, doesn't matter how hard we push, it's not a windows application. Oh, I can see having gEDA components window integrated to get more users involved and further open tools without losing the toolkit functions of the components. It just takes some consistent vision on the core requirements. John Griessen -- Ecosensory Austin TX ___ geda-user mailing list geda-user@moria.seul.org http://www.seul.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/geda-user
Re: gEDA-user: gEDA just hit SlashDotOrg (why live CD wouldn't work)
On Sun, Aug 2, 2009 at 1:11 AM, igor2ig...@inno.bme.hu wrote: On Sat, 1 Aug 2009, evan foss wrote: You know the mechanical people have a livecd or I think it is dvd now. Perhaps we should have an electronics live disk of some kind? For a few semesters I was teaching gschem/pcb for undergrads. In the very first semester I tried with live cd (one I built myself) but it didn't work out as good as I expected. Reasons for this, in my opinion, are little issues: some seemingly unimportant convention of windows that windows users are so got used to that they do not want to switch to anything else, even if what they are currently using is the worst possible way of doing that thing. Some examples (and possible solutions): That is a group of people who didn't want to learn something new. I am not being anti windows, I just expect students to want to learn. - window manager; there are ways to make the live cd run a very similar window manager that windows has, but it will never be the same. Any little difference will annoy windows users. Being annoyed until you get used to a new thing is a sign of their being inflexible. Mac users are the same way in some cases when told they need to use their command prompt. If it is just annoying to them they will still get their work done. - command line; most of windows users believe if you need to type commands or you see a prompt, that's the sign you are doing something wrong. On this, xgsch2pcb helped a lot but... Again shame on them for being hostile to learning new and different things. - ... but these are separate programs, tools are not integrated, omg, this will be very complicated how could i ever learn this? Really, this You as the teacher should have talked them down from this. Each tool only does 1 thing very simply. was one of the big surprises for my students, that doing different tasks can be best achieved by using different tools. And this is not even about Seriously? Do they try to use the same tools for all tasks. How many go home and sharpen pencils with a food processor? hjaving back annotation, it's purely about having everything in one big window. I am rather sure if anyone would come up with a tool that integrates xgsch2pcb, gschem and pcb into a single window with tabs, these users won't ever notice they are separate programs even if mouse commands are different in each window. There was a time I wanted to do that. Then I realized it wasn't going to be as flexable as using makefiles. - and if we are already here, the mouse. I remember I had hard time learning PCB and gschem; all the hotkeys and strange mouse controls. But Oh come on. I when I was an undergrad (which ended in May) my program insisted we all learn autocad with the funny hotkeys and that is a program that working in electronics I will likely never use. when I started, I understood these all have a reason, and the controls are optimized for smooth workflow. After the learning curve, using these bindings are really fast. However, windows users do not care about being fast. Really, it's not gEDA-specific. I remember the old, DOS versions of autocad. The same story there with the command line. Those who really The current version of autocad still uses all those funny keys but there are also menus you can use for the same thing. Funny but I think geda does the same thing. I have not checked all the hotkeys. learned using acad back then had one hand on keyboard, one hand on mouse. Selecting objects and sometimes coordinates done with mouse, actions done using the keyboard. When I got to learn autocad at the university again, it was already a windows version: right click and a menu pops up. This way only one hand works, and selecting the line tool or the perpendicular menu item takes much longer then typing l or perp. Of course there was a command line in the windows version as well, but noone bothered to use it, teachers didn't even teach the commands. I remember I tried to show some of my classmates how much faster using commands can be, but they were totally uninterested. For gEDA, I believe this is another blocker for windows users: it is optimized for speed (of use). Of course No it is a block to all users who want that speed. They could use the graphical menus if they wanted too. mouse bindings can be changed and I guess it's not a big deal to add context sensitive menus for the right click, but without these, windows users won't take it serious. Really, number of popups matter... - drive letters; they do want to name their hard disk c: and they find it more convenient to remember their usb pendrive as f: than to remember it as /mnt/pendrive. Even if drive letters are assigned in an In most GUI's now the mounted file systems come up with icons on the desktop. Since you really shouldn't work on files directly on a USB stick I don't see the problem with copying them when they are done in the GUI. This could all be solved by
Re: gEDA-user: gEDA just hit SlashDotOrg (why live CD wouldn't work)
On Sun, Aug 2, 2009 at 6:30 PM, evan fossevanf...@gmail.com wrote: On Sun, Aug 2, 2009 at 1:11 AM, igor2ig...@inno.bme.hu wrote: On Sat, 1 Aug 2009, evan foss wrote: You know the mechanical people have a livecd or I think it is dvd now. Perhaps we should have an electronics live disk of some kind? For a few semesters I was teaching gschem/pcb for undergrads. In the very first semester I tried with live cd (one I built myself) but it didn't work out as good as I expected... That is a group of people who didn't want to learn something new. I am not being anti windows, I just expect students to want to learn. Real men program in C was just posted on Embdded.com http://www.embedded.com/design/218600142 : I learned the quiche-like phrase assigns both a high difficulty factor to the C language and a certain age group to C programmers. Put simply, C was too hard for programmers of their [young] generation to bother mastering. - command line; most of windows users believe if you need to type commands Most Windows users simply can't type at all. I've seen that far to often when I'm trying to teach one to use a program. :-( Seriously? Do they try to use the same tools for all tasks. The ones that are good with EMACS will. Especially with the new Butterfly command in 23.1. :-) How many go home and sharpen pencils with a food processor? My onion dicier might work better at that task... Oh come on. I when I was an undergrad (which ended in May) my program insisted we all learn autocad with the funny hotkeys and that is a program that working in electronics I will likely never use. AutoCAD is very valuable in electronics for the correct tasks, like board dimensions and footprints. When I was in school I thought I'd never need English, who cares what you end your sentences with [SIC]. Now years later I find I'm writing publications for places like CDC/NIOSH, posting messages like this for many to read etc. Never Say Never. In most GUI's now the mounted file systems come up with icons on the desktop. Since you really shouldn't work on files directly on a USB stick I don't see the problem with copying them when they are done in the GUI. This could all be solved by making a live USB key with a fat32 partition to transfer files between windows and linux on. Booting a LiveCD of any flavor in some companies is grounds for getting fired. Its the IT way or the highway usually to the detriment of the company in the long term. I think most of your problems were user issues not usability issues. Blame the user doesn't really help in any issue. What's important is not that we can conceive the idea, but that when we actually test it on people you discover it doesn't work... your intuition is wrong. - Daniel M. Russell (IBM Almaden / Xerox PARC) There are published user guidelines for GUIs: User Experience: http://developer.apple.com/documentation/UserExperience/index.html http://developer.apple.com/ue/index.html Design Specifications and Guidelines - Visual Design: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms997619.aspx GNOME Human Interface Guidelines: http://live.gnome.org/UsabilityProject GNOME Human Interface Guidelines http://library.gnome.org/devel/hig-book/stable/ Those are from the wxWidgets reference I have at hand, I'm sure there are ones for QT and KDE and most others as well. John Dotty made a good point that if the windows users want it let one of them maintain it. I agree, and I've been the most vocal over the years here about it, and keep trying to get there. Alas like everyone else here we have day jobs and other commitments to keep us from doing what we would really like to be doing. This community exists because all of us wanted an open source EDA tool. If people really wanted a windows one then where are they? They are at KiCAD http://www.lis.inpg.fr/realise_au_lis/kicad/ , http://www.freepcb.com/ note the links to TinyCAD for schematic, LTSpice for simulation, and OrCAD Demo (At one time there was a much older full package at the Yahoogroup I mentioned in the other message) http://www.freepcb.com/resources.htm , AutoTrax http://www.kov.com/ (seems to switch back and forth between open source and not open source over the years, not sure of the current state) I probably could go on without much effort. be volunteering to help maintain a windows release. Maintaining it is far different than getting it to work correctly in the first place. I can't say much about gEDA (the schematic part) on Windows as I don't use it there, but PCB I do use weekly on Windows and it has some significant problems related to printing and library management. One of my Windows printing patches is in the patch tracker, need to work more on some of the other related sections. I've started to think it would be easier just to start off with wxWidgets from scratch after looking at what it takes to get PCB to print on Windows as it currently stands on Windows (I'm spoiled by
Re: gEDA-user: gEDA just hit SlashDotOrg (why live CD wouldn't work)
Bob Paddock wrote: On Sun, Aug 2, 2009 at 6:30 PM, evan fossevanf...@gmail.com wrote: This could all be solved by making a live USB key with a fat32 partition to transfer files between windows and linux on. Booting a LiveCD of any flavor in some companies is grounds for getting fired. Its the IT way or the highway usually to the detriment of the company in the long term. I hadn't thought about that before somehow... yes, starting up a liveCD in the office where IT rules rule would be like injecting a virus in the corporate culture! Still, I do hear some of that going on -- must be in small renegade groups though. Thanks for the other programming thoughts. John -- Ecosensory Austin TX ___ geda-user mailing list geda-user@moria.seul.org http://www.seul.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/geda-user
Re: gEDA-user: gEDA just hit SlashDotOrg (why live CD wouldn't work)
On Sun, 02 Aug 2009 18:30:54 -0400, evan foss wrote: If people really wanted a windows one then where are they? In the kicad user group? Hanging out in eagle.support.eng? Note, that the vast majority of users don't demand better software. They just take, what is there. If it doesn't fit their needs, they use something else. ---(kaimartin)--- -- Kai-Martin Knaak Öffentlicher PGP-Schlüssel: http://pgp.mit.edu:11371/pks/lookup?op=getsearch=0x6C0B9F53 ___ geda-user mailing list geda-user@moria.seul.org http://www.seul.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/geda-user
Re: gEDA-user: gEDA just hit SlashDotOrg (why live CD wouldn't work)
On Sun, Aug 2, 2009 at 7:35 PM, Bob Paddockbob.padd...@gmail.com wrote: On Sun, Aug 2, 2009 at 6:30 PM, evan fossevanf...@gmail.com wrote: On Sun, Aug 2, 2009 at 1:11 AM, igor2ig...@inno.bme.hu wrote: On Sat, 1 Aug 2009, evan foss wrote: You know the mechanical people have a livecd or I think it is dvd now. Perhaps we should have an electronics live disk of some kind? For a few semesters I was teaching gschem/pcb for undergrads. In the very first semester I tried with live cd (one I built myself) but it didn't work out as good as I expected... That is a group of people who didn't want to learn something new. I am not being anti windows, I just expect students to want to learn. Real men program in C was just posted on Embdded.com http://www.embedded.com/design/218600142 : I learned the quiche-like phrase assigns both a high difficulty factor to the C language and a certain age group to C programmers. Put simply, C was too hard for programmers of their [young] generation to bother mastering. The end is near. - command line; most of windows users believe if you need to type commands Most Windows users simply can't type at all. I've seen that far to often when I'm trying to teach one to use a program. :-( Seriously? Do they try to use the same tools for all tasks. The ones that are good with EMACS will. Especially with the new Butterfly command in 23.1. :-) Sorry as a VIM user I just don't agree. :) How many go home and sharpen pencils with a food processor? My onion dicier might work better at that task... LOL Oh come on. I when I was an undergrad (which ended in May) my program insisted we all learn autocad with the funny hotkeys and that is a program that working in electronics I will likely never use. AutoCAD is very valuable in electronics for the correct tasks, like board dimensions and footprints. True. When I was in school I thought I'd never need English, who cares what you end your sentences with [SIC]. Now years later I find Yes I know my grammer is frequently faulty. I'm writing publications for places like CDC/NIOSH, posting messages like this for many to read etc. Never Say Never. Fair enough. In most GUI's now the mounted file systems come up with icons on the desktop. Since you really shouldn't work on files directly on a USB stick I don't see the problem with copying them when they are done in the GUI. This could all be solved by making a live USB key with a fat32 partition to transfer files between windows and linux on. Booting a LiveCD of any flavor in some companies is grounds for getting fired. Its the IT way or the highway usually to the detriment of the company in the long term. See in the places I have worked it hasn't been an issue. Both organizations had the attitude that what ever you need or want to use for the job is what you should get. This is of course budget limited. I think most of your problems were user issues not usability issues. Blame the user doesn't really help in any issue. Ok. My attitude was wrong. Sorry guys. What's important is not that we can conceive the idea, but that when we actually test it on people you discover it doesn't work... your intuition is wrong. - Daniel M. Russell (IBM Almaden / Xerox PARC) There are published user guidelines for GUIs: User Experience: http://developer.apple.com/documentation/UserExperience/index.html http://developer.apple.com/ue/index.html Design Specifications and Guidelines - Visual Design: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms997619.aspx GNOME Human Interface Guidelines: http://live.gnome.org/UsabilityProject GNOME Human Interface Guidelines http://library.gnome.org/devel/hig-book/stable/ Those are from the wxWidgets reference I have at hand, I'm sure there are ones for QT and KDE and most others as well. John Dotty made a good point that if the windows users want it let one of them maintain it. I agree, and I've been the most vocal over the years here about it, and keep trying to get there. Alas like everyone else here we have day jobs and other commitments to keep us from doing what we would really like to be doing. This community exists because all of us wanted an open source EDA tool. If people really wanted a windows one then where are they? They are at KiCAD http://www.lis.inpg.fr/realise_au_lis/kicad/ , http://www.freepcb.com/ note the links to TinyCAD for schematic, LTSpice for simulation, and OrCAD Demo (At one time there was a much older full package at the Yahoogroup I mentioned in the other message) http://www.freepcb.com/resources.htm , AutoTrax http://www.kov.com/ (seems to switch back and forth between open source and not open source over the years, not sure of the current state) I probably could go on without much effort. So then why do people still keep coming here demanding gEDA be more like those programs? be volunteering to help maintain a windows release. Maintaining it
Re: gEDA-user: gEDA just hit SlashDotOrg (why live CD wouldn't work)
On Sun, 02 Aug 2009 22:16:10 -0400, evan foss wrote: So then why do people still keep coming here demanding gEDA be more like those programs? I have been reading this list long enough to say, that they don't. Ok, there have been one and a half cases since 2005. This is hardly a base to make a realistic asessment what the windows users want. Oh. I though there was a cygwin build or something from a long time ago and it was just not maintained. There is a cygwin based install and a version compiled for windows. I put both for download on the server at my day-job: http://bibo.iqo.uni-hannover.de/dokuwiki/doku.php?id=fertigung:start There is an english version of the install howto: http://bibo.iqo.uni-hannover.de/dokuwiki/doku.php?id=fertigung:englische_version_der_anleitung Both installs include gaf and pcb. I'd be happy to hear how smooth the windows versions run. However, no comments arrived, yet. ---(kaimartin)--- -- Kai-Martin Knaak Öffentlicher PGP-Schlüssel: http://pgp.mit.edu:11371/pks/lookup?op=getsearch=0x6C0B9F53 ___ geda-user mailing list geda-user@moria.seul.org http://www.seul.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/geda-user
Re: gEDA-user: gEDA just hit SlashDotOrg (why live CD wouldn't work)
On Monday 03 August 2009 00:35:02 Bob Paddock wrote: Seriously? Do they try to use the same tools for all tasks. The ones that are good with EMACS will. Especially with the new Butterfly command in 23.1. :-) It sounds like my next project should be to re-implement gschem etc as ELisp packages. Peter :-P -- Peter Brett pe...@peter-b.co.uk Remote Sensing Research Group Surrey Space Centre signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part. ___ geda-user mailing list geda-user@moria.seul.org http://www.seul.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/geda-user
Re: gEDA-user: gEDA just hit SlashDotOrg (why live CD wouldn't work)
On Sat, 1 Aug 2009, evan foss wrote: You know the mechanical people have a livecd or I think it is dvd now. Perhaps we should have an electronics live disk of some kind? For a few semesters I was teaching gschem/pcb for undergrads. In the very first semester I tried with live cd (one I built myself) but it didn't work out as good as I expected. Reasons for this, in my opinion, are little issues: some seemingly unimportant convention of windows that windows users are so got used to that they do not want to switch to anything else, even if what they are currently using is the worst possible way of doing that thing. Some examples (and possible solutions): - window manager; there are ways to make the live cd run a very similar window manager that windows has, but it will never be the same. Any little difference will annoy windows users. - command line; most of windows users believe if you need to type commands or you see a prompt, that's the sign you are doing something wrong. On this, xgsch2pcb helped a lot but... - ... but these are separate programs, tools are not integrated, omg, this will be very complicated how could i ever learn this? Really, this was one of the big surprises for my students, that doing different tasks can be best achieved by using different tools. And this is not even about hjaving back annotation, it's purely about having everything in one big window. I am rather sure if anyone would come up with a tool that integrates xgsch2pcb, gschem and pcb into a single window with tabs, these users won't ever notice they are separate programs even if mouse commands are different in each window. - and if we are already here, the mouse. I remember I had hard time learning PCB and gschem; all the hotkeys and strange mouse controls. But when I started, I understood these all have a reason, and the controls are optimized for smooth workflow. After the learning curve, using these bindings are really fast. However, windows users do not care about being fast. Really, it's not gEDA-specific. I remember the old, DOS versions of autocad. The same story there with the command line. Those who really learned using acad back then had one hand on keyboard, one hand on mouse. Selecting objects and sometimes coordinates done with mouse, actions done using the keyboard. When I got to learn autocad at the university again, it was already a windows version: right click and a menu pops up. This way only one hand works, and selecting the line tool or the perpendicular menu item takes much longer then typing l or perp. Of course there was a command line in the windows version as well, but noone bothered to use it, teachers didn't even teach the commands. I remember I tried to show some of my classmates how much faster using commands can be, but they were totally uninterested. For gEDA, I believe this is another blocker for windows users: it is optimized for speed (of use). Of course mouse bindings can be changed and I guess it's not a big deal to add context sensitive menus for the right click, but without these, windows users won't take it serious. Really, number of popups matter... - drive letters; they do want to name their hard disk c: and they find it more convenient to remember their usb pendrive as f: than to remember it as /mnt/pendrive. Even if drive letters are assigned in an obscure way that when you insert a new hard disk as secondary master or primary slave, half of your drive letters would be shifted. Even if sometimes you want to have more mounts than alphabet would allow. This sounds ridiculous, but even in my fdaytime job, where we hire programmers and convert them to *NIX, this is one of the things that they say windows is better for the longest time. Of course this one can be really solved only with a native windows version. - this one is the first issue I can even understand: if you boot a live CD, you can not run the programs you normally run. This was not a real problem 15 years ago, but nowdays almost everyone is constantly online and they run their whatever network clients (chat clients, internet phone clients, rss readers with some sort of notifications). People get used to those little popups or blinking icons (or however they do it) and booting a live CD means going offline with those. For me, I have an ssh session so booting a live CD wouldn't hurt me as far as I have network and an ssh client - but if not, I can imagine not wanting to use the live CD for working with a CAD for a day. This could be solved if the live CD also offered running inside colinux or something similar (maybe even autostart a colinux or an emulator from the CD when the user inserts it). Conclusion: I think a pure live CD won't help much. Something that integrates better in the windows environment, and where integration is not possible, something that looks and acts exactly the same way (even if that's stupid and slow) is necessary to convience majority of windows users to even consider gEDA. I totally agree
