Part of the reason for this thread was to save space. In its current state, if the window is resized so that italicized text is cut in a way that looks pretty unprofessional. My point is that the italicized text does not really add much information over the bold faced text. It is just a more wordy version of it, mostly adding the word “project” to the boldfaced text. The only one that I find brings in more real information is the one for Convert, but that one could be remedied by boldfacing the text “Convert Bitmap” instead. To me the italicized text is clearly a text that looks like it belongs in a popup.
I really think we need to keep the project manager. Otherwise the burden is going to be on the desktop to contain icons to launch every single (or most) KiCad applications. With running different versions that quickly will clutter the desktop or whatever menu system is used to launch KiCad. The project manager is really useful when running multiple instances of KiCad.
This is a viewpoint formed around how KiCad works today. I’m thinking beyond that, to a future KiCad that supports having multiple documents open at once, etc.
Eeschema already has a toolbutton to launch Pcbnew and vice versa. There is not that much need from a UX point of view to have a whole application that is just responsible for opening other applications. Most of the reason for the KiCad project manager existing is due to the technical implementation. Future versions of Eeschema and Pcbnew will likely support having multiple documents open at once (it’s a highly-desired feature) and so will likely also include project trees to navigate and open documents.
What do you envision that the icon on the desktop is going to point to? Would there be a single application icon or multiple desktop icons?
Being able to keep multiple project open at a time would be nice. Keep in mind though that it would not solve the problem of keeping multiple versions running at a time for testing purposes.
That would have to be figured out (there are already multiple desktop icons today though, since you can launch eeschema and pcbnew standalone)
In V7 we plan to fix all the remaining issues with having multiple versions running at a time
If people are really attached to the idea of having some separate floating window with buttons to open other tools, we could always make a “micro view” of the launcher that collapses to just the buttons and takes up minimal space.
I would also prefer nouns, but just “Schematic”, “PCB Design”, “Footprint Libraries”, “Gerber Viewer”. The most common complaint I’ve heard from people who tried KiCad some time ago is how it is a bunch a separate programs barely held together. With cross probing and many other improvements that really hasn’t been an issue for some time. But I think it’s better not to give people the wrong impression about the number one complaint on the net, by showing them all the internal names as the first thing they see
I’m going to link my post that didn’t get split here about changing the layout based on whether a project is loaded or not: My Current Take on the New V6 Icons
I think that’d much friendlier than showing a message box after clicking on “Schematic”.
I am kind of sad to see the big empty white area go away.
In it’s current stat it was not useful, but it had a promise of some future functionality.
Some things that could have gone into that box:
File preview (schematic / PCB)
Project notes (text file)
General error messages / status
A logical solution would also be to make it look sort of like a file browser window in “icon” mode. In that way it has the icons for Eeschema, Pcbnew, etc, but also the icons from the files in the project directory.
A possible solution for the long path names:
They can be shown in the pane on the left in a “tree” view kind of way, so each sub directory is one line of text. To keep it compact, not all directories on sub levels are displayed, but just the path to the current project.
I’ve drawn a red box around the “current active project”. That can be improved I think.
This could also be expanded to browsing to another directory, and making another project active. In that case, show the directory listing of the “deepest” current level, and another project could then be made active by double clicking on a KiCad project directory, or KiCad project file.
Also: Some time ago I did an experiment with hierarchical “multi PCB” projects and it seemed to work. In short, Each PCB has it’s own project (all in the same directory), but there is also a “mother’ project”. which does not have a PCB itself, but has hierarchical sheets to the other project files. This is officially “not supported” (as far as I know) but similar functionality has been requested multiple times on this user forum. It would be nice if changes to the project manager are made with (growing in the direction of something like this.
We plan to support these kinds of things in the future, however it is independent of the project manager GUI itself. The GUI will just follow the underlying design, and we should be flexible to consider if a more complicated and feature-full “project manager” GUI is really the right approach.
