17 Feb
2017
17 Feb
'17
10:07 a.m.
Being a long time Eagle user, I'll chime in too. Most responses from
KiCAD advocates miss the mark on the fundamental issue. Sure the
features are converging and I have no doubt KiCAD will catch-up. It has
already surpassed Eagle in many feature areas. But people who routinely
spend dozens of hours a week doing eCAD work (> than a hobbyist), use
their tool as a super-efficient extension of their workflow intent. To
suddenly switch to a tool with an entirely different workflow or UI
mechanics is like a right handed person trying to relearn how to do
everything left handed. It's takes a really long frustrating time. Maybe
even longer than if you didn't know Eagle, Altium, Cadence, DS5000, etc
to begin with.
My hope is the KiCAD community would see this as an opportunity to
significantly grow the user base by adding conversion tools and UI
improvements designed to help new-comers from other tools transition
more easily; even prioritize them short-term over additional new
features. Even vi and emacs have mutual key-binding compatibility modes
designed to ease transitions - and the user base couldn't be more
divided on pride.
I find the KiCAD UI 'clunky' and it really isn't. It's only clunky
coming from my Eagle point of view.
-Alan
On 2017-02-17 12:46, Guy Sotomayor Jr wrote:
Just to add my $0.02 to this conversation. I'm an
Eagle (professional) user for
well over a decade. The issue the Phillip mentioned about footprints and designs
is real.
On my last design I decided to give KiCAD a try and quickly realized that the
large libraries of parts and footprints I have would have to be completely re-done.
That made the bar too high to switch. Most of my designs use footprints that I have
developed or are readily available. Also, many new parts vendors supply Eagle
libraries for their parts so I don't have to develop them. I haven't seen
anything
for KiCAD regarding that...which means even more work for me.
Tool lock-in is a real phenomenon not just for the "wet-ware" but also for all
of the
parts libraries that exist for the tools (either vendor, community or self developed).
So without a support infrastructure for parts libraries, a tool is just a "toy"
regardless
of how good the underlying implementation is.
In terms of community supplied libraries, Eagle has those too and I've found that
by and large they are junk (it's easier/quicker for me to create a part on my own
than to try and figure out what bizarre thing the contributor actually did and I still
need to check it anyway). While I haven't seen a lot of KiCAD contributed libraries
(that's part of the problem) I have no expectation that they would be better than
the Eagle contributed libraries.
TTFN - Guy