Out of the Box Gripes

johannes kotz wrote on Sun, 03 January 2010 11:31

to James Morrison: Since years, I'm using my own eagle.scr. So, why

don't you make your personal Eagle GUI like me. I really like this way to

personalize Eagle.

Sure, that's fine.  And I do the same.

But the whole point of this thread is that when you first install EAGLE you

don't know how to do that.  And there are some functions that I would think

(as a new user) are so integral to design that the tool should support them

out of the box in a very obvious, documented, and supported way.

Consider this scenario:  You are a small startup company.  You have a

limited budget and a real product you need to get to market as soon as

possible in order to start realising income and make the business viable.

For a CAD tool a team leader does his research and comes to two options:

EAGLE and Tool A.  He installs EAGLE freeware to evaluate and try to design

a small board.  This person is looking at how easy it is for his team to

get up and running with a new tool.  For every function that he has to (if

he even could) write or research his own ULP that is adding to the learning

curve and initial cost.

Now he loads Tool A and gets an eval license.  Sure it only runs on Windows

and sure it's more money out of the box.  But it does include all the

things he was looking for in a very integrated way that is documented,

integrated, and supported.  If he has an issue he can call the company

support line up and get answers.  And sure there is a maintenance cost but

he doesn't care about that now.  If they get to market they'll have cash to

spend, if not then they won't pay.

Now you tell me which way he is going to go.  If it takes a week to go

through EAGLE and set it up so that the rest of his team can use it then at

$100/hour (not unreasonable) that's $4000.  The difference in cost between

EAGLE and Tool A is less than $4000.  And he's not confident he can even

make EAGLE do what he wants (because he's new remember!).

To me that's a no-brainer.  You choose Tool A.

The whole point of this is that the more intuitive and documented EAGLE is

to use, the easier it will be for new users to choose EAGLE as their CAD

tool of choice.  That means more people will (eventually) upgrade to a paid

license and inject money into the company.  In turn, in a perfect world,

that means more development is done and more features are added to EAGLE,

it continues to get better, and we all benefit.

And the more things that work ouf of the box the less questions we get here

about the very basic stuff.  New users are less frustrated and the SNR of

the group goes up even higher.

And my apologies to the females in the group.  The above person in the

example just happened to be male.  Could have been female too, it's just

how it came out of my brain as I wrote it.

Cheers,

James.

--

James Morrison  ~~~  Stratford Digital

email:  james@eaglecentral.ca

web: http://www.eaglecentral.ca

Specialising in CadSoft EAGLE

• Online Sales to North America

• Electronic Design Services

• EAGLE Enterprise Toolkit

--

Browser access to CadSoft Support Forums at http://www.eaglecentral.ca

johannes kotz wrote on Sun, 03 January 2010 11:31

to James Morrison: Since years, I'm using my own eagle.scr. So, why

don't you make your personal Eagle GUI like me. I really like this way to

personalize Eagle.

Sure, that's fine.  And I do the same.

But the whole point of this thread is that when you first install EAGLE you

don't know how to do that.  And there are some functions that I would think

(as a new user) are so integral to design that the tool should support them

out of the box in a very obvious, documented, and supported way.

Consider this scenario:  You are a small startup company.  You have a

limited budget and a real product you need to get to market as soon as

possible in order to start realising income and make the business viable.

For a CAD tool a team leader does his research and comes to two options:

EAGLE and Tool A.  He installs EAGLE freeware to evaluate and try to design

a small board.  This person is looking at how easy it is for his team to

get up and running with a new tool.  For every function that he has to (if

he even could) write or research his own ULP that is adding to the learning

curve and initial cost.

Now he loads Tool A and gets an eval license.  Sure it only runs on Windows

and sure it's more money out of the box.  But it does include all the

things he was looking for in a very integrated way that is documented,

integrated, and supported.  If he has an issue he can call the company

support line up and get answers.  And sure there is a maintenance cost but

he doesn't care about that now.  If they get to market they'll have cash to

spend, if not then they won't pay.

Now you tell me which way he is going to go.  If it takes a week to go

through EAGLE and set it up so that the rest of his team can use it then at

$100/hour (not unreasonable) that's $4000.  The difference in cost between

EAGLE and Tool A is less than $4000.  And he's not confident he can even

make EAGLE do what he wants (because he's new remember!).

To me that's a no-brainer.  You choose Tool A.

The whole point of this is that the more intuitive and documented EAGLE is

to use, the easier it will be for new users to choose EAGLE as their CAD

tool of choice.  That means more people will (eventually) upgrade to a paid

license and inject money into the company.  In turn, in a perfect world,

that means more development is done and more features are added to EAGLE,

it continues to get better, and we all benefit.

And the more things that work ouf of the box the less questions we get here

about the very basic stuff.  New users are less frustrated and the SNR of

the group goes up even higher.

And my apologies to the females in the group.  The above person in the

example just happened to be male.  Could have been female too, it's just

how it came out of my brain as I wrote it.

Cheers,

James.

--

James Morrison  ~~~  Stratford Digital

email:  james@eaglecentral.ca

web: http://www.eaglecentral.ca

Specialising in CadSoft EAGLE

• Online Sales to North America

• Electronic Design Services

• EAGLE Enterprise Toolkit

--

Browser access to CadSoft Support Forums at http://www.eaglecentral.ca