Anyone using KiCad on OS X? I’m trying it now for the first time, and it’s working fairly well, except that there seems to be a strange graphical glitch in Eeschema (and the library editor), near the bottom right of the sheet origin. It seems that a small section of the sheet is being rendered at about double size, overlaying the original render. Kind of like a magnifying glass. Has anyone seen this before? Or better yet, know of any way to fix it?
Have you seen this thread? Tips for running KiCad on Mac OS X?
OSX builds seem rather shaky compared to Linux and Windows…
Yeah, I know it’s not nearly as polished, but I’m rather sick of having to deal with VMWare Fusion constantly running in the background. I figure that if I want KiCad to work better on OS X, I might as well start using it, filing bug reports, and if I really care, submitting patches (though my C++foo is…not good).
I just found a script here (http://discuss.wayneandlayne.com/t/new-os-x-builder/73/4) that builds mostly successfully, though there’s a few errors (my solutions are posted on that thread). KiCad opens up and seems to run, though I haven’t done too much with it just yet. The only major problem I’ve seen is this issue with the top left corner of the Eeschema canvas acting like a magnifying glass. Or, maybe more specifically, the bottom right quadrant from the origin of the sheet. I’m suspecting it’s a WxWidgets problem, but I don’t have the expertise necessary to really troubleshoot that.
Hi, all. I’m brand new to the forum and relatively new to KiCad, but have been using KiCad on OS X for several months. Electronics is only a hobby for me, and a new one at that. My needs are simple and my usage of KiCad reflects that. I’ve designed only one board all the way through to manufacture and it was dirt simple.
That said, I’ve been using my own builds of the stable branch for all of this and have been quite pleased with it. It has been reasonably stable (as the branch would imply) and the feature set has been more than adequate for my needs. While the whizzy new features of the mainline development are alluring, what I wish for more than having push and shove routing is the ability to design a board complex enough to need it. 
Still it seems the writing is on the wall for the stable branch. Bug fixes are few and far between and there is absolutely no feature work going on there. What’s more, the library situation is in such upheaval that there seems virtually no chance of support for the legacy libraries.
So with that in mind I set out to build and try out builds of the trunk to see just how bad they are on OS X. To my surprise, they’re not bad at all. Keeping in mind that I probably don’t exercise them like a real pro would, they’ve been reasonably stable so far, and the OpenGL canvas has performed great and the new features seem to work as advertised. I’m on a quite modern system with a good video card and lots of video and system ram, so that may help.
The state of the build system is another matter altogether. It is horrid, though I understand that progress is being made on that front. I had to bash on it quite a bit to get usable builds to come out the other end, but I’m pleased with the result. I hacked my builds to scroll on mousewheel events rather than zoom, because I’m using a trackpad and got tired of my board zooming off to infinity every time I touched a second finger to the trackpad. I’ll probably try to implement pinch zooming and then I think I’ll be happy enough to use these as my regular builds.
I’m still trying to figure out the new library landscape, but hopefully it won’t involve sacrificing any goats to get them laid out and installed in a usable way. I’m sort of on the fence about the github plugin. Seems like a good idea but a questionable implementation. Time will tell.
Anyway, I just wanted to chime in to say that I think it’s possible to get good usable OS X builds of KiCad. Using it in a VM, as it seems many folks do, would be a non-starter for me. I’d probably just give up on KiCad if that was the case. Thankfully, it doesn’t have to be.
Spike,
If you get pinch-to-zoom working please make sure to submit a patch upstream. Heck, even maybe submit a patch about the mousewheel events, because I’ve had to go find an old 3 button USB mouse to get PCBNew to be usable in OS X (not that I like using the touchpad for CAD work, but it’s nice as an option if I’m not at my desk).
-Ian
Since posting that I’ve managed to get pinch to zoom mostly working. For the OpenGL canvas it works well enough for my purposes. I’d like to rejigger the default canvas to behave a bit more like OpenGL.
I’d have to clean up the patches to account for non-OS X platforms, something I completely ignored, and probably would need a tiny bit of configuration UI for folks to enable it. That’s work; something I’m not very good at. I suppose it’s worth trying to get this submitted upstream, though.
Both things require a patch to wxWidgets on top of what’s already needed for KiCad on OS X. Which reminds me that in all my babbling in my first post, I neglected to mention that the likely cause of your graphical glitch is that you are using an unpatched wxWidgets. These used to be just floating around the intertron but I believe they have captured the most important ones in the patches directory at the top level of the KiCad tree.
Even if you don’t know (or want) to do the GUI configuration work, at least submit the patch to the developer list, because if it works well enough I’m sure someone would be willing to help with that stuff.
As far as the WxWidgets patch, yeah, I kind of figured it was something along those lines, though I had hoped it wouldn’t require any special patches. I’ll take a look at it over the next couple of days and see if I can get it working.
Thanks!