[sdiy] Pulsonix PCB design software

[mskala at ansuz.sooke.bc.ca]

On Wed, 26 Jul 2017, Steve wrote:
> > Most of what he describes are user errors
>
> Yeah. Conveniently by definition... that's relevant how?

There are user errors and then there are user errors.  For instance, the
complaint about "move" not stretching the connecting wires - that's
because "drag" is the operation that stretches the connecting wires.  Both
are useful things to do, they have to be called something, and it's hard
for me to see it as the software's fault that the guy spent his time
complaining instead of looking for the well-marked feature that would've
done what he wanted.  Similarly, most of the complaints about zooming are
configurable options. I don't see it as the software's fault that it
didn't come preconfigured to his preferences by default, and even if it
did there would be other people who wouldn't prefer those settings and
would be equally annoyed.

The analogy to gas and brake pedals in a car makes little sense because
there's a well-established standard for how cars work.  There isn't, for
schematic capture software - and honestly, to the extent there are prior
schematic capture packages to imitate, they are even MORE annoying and
different from present-day desktop GUI conventions.  Many of the
annoyances in Kicad, gEDA, and similar, actually result from attempting to
follow the "standard" set by those earlier commercial packages.

A better car analogy might be that my car is badly designed because it
crashed when I didn't touch the steering wheel.  How is "You used it
wrong!" an answer to that?

-- 
Matthew Skala
mskala at ansuz.sooke.bc.ca                 People before principles.
http://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/