Altium and Element14 partnership

On 11/12/2014 1:47 AM, Ian Johnston wrote:

 

Just wondering where this leaves Eagle Pcb......?

 

Hi Ian,

The way management see this is that EAGLE PCB is going to take care of

the low end while Circuit Studio will take care of the high end. Circuit

Studio is still almost 2x the price of an EAGLE Pro and it's going to

have yearly maintenance.

Farnell is still comitted to EAGLE and will continue to invest in it, to

provide for the needs of the lower end market. Circuit Studio is cheap

but only from Altium's perspective.

The goal is that they complement each other.

hth,

Jorge Garcia

On Wed, 12 Nov 2014 14:38:52 -0500, Jorge Garcia

<jorge@cadsoftusa.com> wrote:

On 11/12/2014 1:47 AM, Ian Johnston wrote:

 

Just wondering where this leaves Eagle Pcb......?

 

 

Hi Ian,

 

The way management see this is that EAGLE PCB is going to take care of

the low end while Circuit Studio will take care of the high end. Circuit

Studio is still almost 2x the price of an EAGLE Pro and it's going to

have yearly maintenance.

 

Farnell is still comitted to EAGLE and will continue to invest in it, to

provide for the needs of the lower end market. Circuit Studio is cheap

but only from Altium's perspective.

 

The goal is that they complement each other.

 

hth,

Jorge Garcia

Hi Jorge,

Altium are also bringing out another new app.....Circuit Maker. It's

aimed at the hobbyist.

http://circuitmaker.com/#why_circuitmaker

Altium Circuit Maker = low end hobbyist

Altium Circuit Studio = Pro

Altium Designer = Enterprise

So, Altium are looking at all markets.......and I can't help but feel

they are looking to take out the Eagle PCB hobbyist market also.

Jorge, I like EaglePCB.........but in the future who knows what app I

will be using. To tell you the truth it's up to CadSoft right

now......they MUST step up NOW with some killer features instead of

these small tweaks.

Altium have a LOT of marketing money behind them so beware..........

Ian.

So, Altium are looking at all markets.......and I can't help but feel

they are looking to take out the Eagle PCB hobbyist market also.

 

Jorge, I like EaglePCB.........but in the future who knows what app I

will be using. To tell you the truth it's up to CadSoft right

now......they MUST step up NOW with some killer features instead of

these small tweaks.

Altium have a LOT of marketing money behind them so beware..........

Being realistic, unless EAGLE grew in manpower tenfold we're never going

to be on the same level as Altium. And we're OK with that, we will

continue to improve EAGLE and put in as many features as possible and do

our best to please our customers the way we've always tried to do.

Killer features mean different things to different people, what is basic

to one person is completely superfluous to another. Our next release 7.2

will be a bug fix release with 7.3 having more substantial improvements.

I'm looking forward to 7.3, since it will be addressing some serious GUI

issues.

The next few months should be interesting.

Best Regards,

Jorge Garcia

On 2014-11-17 20:31:00 +0000, Jorge Garcia said:

Killer features mean different things to different people, what is

basic to one person is completely superfluous to another. Our next

release 7.2 will be a bug fix release with 7.3 having more substantial

improvements. I'm looking forward to 7.3, since it will be addressing

some serious GUI issues.

 

The next few months should be interesting.

It would be REALLY helpful to your devoted customers if you (CadSoft)

would provide a roadmap so we could see what was coming down the line,

what you intend to provide for v7 vs push off to v8, and which bugs you

have acknowledged and are working on a fix, and which version you

expect them to be resolved in...

-A.

Jorge,

Pls explain the "serious GUI issues".

Thanks,

Ian.

As long as Altium does not run natively on Linux or Mac, it will never be on the same level as Eagle.

I refuse to use windows for more than a couple of hours per week. Not even in Virtualbox.

On 2014-11-19 11:18:15 +0000, Joop14 said:

As long as Altium does not run natively on Linux or Mac, it will never

be on the same level as Eagle.

 

I refuse to use windows for more than a couple of hours per week. Not

even in Virtualbox.

Sadly if this is all Eagle is banking on, KiCad will eat Eagle's lunch

and then eat Eagle itself for dessert. They have some serious money

(CERN) behind them now and are making incredible progress.

The only thing that's really keeping me from jumping ship is that

KiCad's current development model is geared more toward a

developer-friendly "break everything and fix it" rather than a more

user-friendly "here's a stable release, we're going to do x in the next

revision" kind of approach.

I love Eagle and have been using it for over a decade, but I'm very

rapidly tiring of their current method of doing business and keeping

their users in the dark. I was hoping that Element14 would have stepped

up and put a better support system in place, but aside from some very

good people in the forums here there has been little change.

-A.

It would be REALLY helpful to your devoted customers if you (CadSoft)

would provide a roadmap so we could see what was coming down the line,

what you intend to provide for v7 vs push off to v8, and which bugs you

have acknowledged and are working on a fix, and which version you expect

them to be resolved in...

I don't know how marketing would feel about something like that. Most

companies don't make info like that available, at least not in detail.

All bugs are acknowledged as long as we can reproduce them, and I

mention whatever fixes I'm allowed to mention or am aware of.

I'll bring the suggestion up to management's attention and see what they

say.

hth,

Jorge Garcia

On 11/19/2014 2:50 AM, Ian Johnston wrote:

Jorge,

 

Pls explain the "serious GUI issues".

I think anyone whose has spent any amount of time on this forum knows

what I'm referring to.The final list hasn't been drafted but here's my

two cents.In my mind the biggest fundamental issue in EAGLE's GUI that

steepens the learning curve is inconsistency in the GUI.

For example, a single component move doesn't behave in the same way a

group move works. Same thing for the COPY command. The tRestrict and

bRestrict layers generate DRC errors, vRestrict doesn't. The list goes

on, all of these inconsistencies force the user to memorize quirks that

are completely unnecessary and just make EAGLE more difficult to the new

user.

The library interface makes operations like renaming, removing, and

copying of devices, packages, and symbols cumbersome, requiring users to

remember device names in order to remove them from the library among

other things. Moving items between libraries though possible is not

straightforward and this makes things more difficult for new users.

The DROP button in the ADD dialog is infamous for confusing the heck out

of new users, as well as the whole WIRE vs NET conundrum.

This is a small sampling, but I think you get the idea.

hth,

Jorge Garcia

CadSoft Guest wrote:

 

KiCad will eat Eagle's lunch

and then eat Eagle itself for dessert. They have some serious money

(CERN) behind them now and are making incredible progress.

I tried Kicad a couple of times. It will take many years for them to get on the same level as Eagle.

- it is super slow with zooming with Ati videocards and, appearantly, they don't feel like fixing it so it's unusable for me.

- the userinterface is crazy and not intuitive. I like the Eagle interface much more because it's more logical.

(I know most people disagree about this but it's true. Maybe it's because I'm als a software developer and my brain adapts easier to the way Eagle does things ;-)

- nothing compares to Eagle's ULP.

- I don't like the way libraries are setup in Kicad.

I don't say Eagle is perfect. For me, the things that I really miss with Eagle are:

- check used libraries / report missing libraries and inconsistencies during "update from libray"

  (create a report about inconsistencies and let the user select what will be updated)

- board mirror view

- exceptions for thermals in polygons

- restrict layers for inner layers

- LTSpice export on Linux

- add external parts to the BOM list

- locale for printf() in ULP

- after smash, properties of names and values are not updated from library anymore

- save last modification date-time stamp in brd and sch file (instead of last saving date-time with or without modification)

- X-ref for busses

Just my opinion,

Kind Regards,

Joop