My Current Take on the New V6 Icons

Software
31

I really like the new icons, the only one that I dislike is the one for the page layout editor. To me, that icon is just deeply unintuitive because it focuses on the fields instead of the lines around the paper and between the fields - which is what I associate with the “look” of a page template. The inversion here is just too abstract - with the old icon you could guess the purpose even if you come from a software that doesn’t have the concept of a dedicated layout editor - with the new icon, you need to know what you are looking for and it still requires abstract thinking about the purpose instead of just clicking on “looks like the thing I want to open”.

I also agree with @eelik, in a few year of using KiCad, I’ve never once learned anything new from the log in the manager window. Why not just stack the icons vertically and place captions next to them. It’s a really simple change but it would give V6 a bit of a new “visual identity”. I would also change the grouping like this - with a heading and (2nd line of small text) for each entry:

Current Project
   Schematic (Open the root sheet of the project)
   PCB Design (Open the main PCB)
   Symbols (Edit project-specific and global symbol libraries)
   Footprints (Edit project-specific and global footprint libraries)
Utilities
   Gerber Viewer (View stacks of Gerber files)
   EE Calculator (Calculator for common PCB and circuit design problems)
   Bitmap Vectorizer (Create footprints from bitmaps)
   Worksheets (Create and edit worksheet templates)

If no project is open, the grouping could change:

Project
   Create new Project
   Open Project
   Open most_recent.kicad_pro (Last edited on 2021-02-07)
Utilities
   Gerber Viewer (View stacks of Gerber files)
   Symbols (Edit global symbols)
   Footprints (Edit global footprints)
   EE Calculator (Run common PCB and circuit design calculations)
   Bitmap Vectorizer (Create footprints from bitmaps)
   Worksheets (Create and edit worksheet templates)

The symbol/footprint editor move between utilities and current project. The calculator should too eventually once it pulls data from the project / PCB stack-up. The word “project-specific” could be a link that opens the “manage footprint/symbols paths” window.

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