I had never clicked on them, but I am also using mechanical CAD and am used with rotating in 3D with holding a mouse button (or two) and moving the mouse.
I quite like the rotating cube in FreeCAD.
You can click on any side, edge or corner to align that with the viewport.
About aligning the board with a viewport.
I don’t like the view on exactly a corner much. It makes terms like “front” & “Back” and “Left” and “Right” fuzzy. [Edit] I was looking for that post 87 but it got lost in those 200+ other ones…
Other EDA programs use “Top” and “Bottom” for a two layer board, but KiCad uses “Front” and “Back”, so I was surpised that when choosing “Front” in the 3d view, the board is rotated to this view:
The question was “which representation is more intuitive to you”, so I answered which one I feel more intuitive.
But any orientation of the axes is alright as far as this orientation is known. I felt more comfortable with Y growing upwards. After the first week with KiCad I felt also comfortable with Y growing downwards. And after some years with KiCad I think I will not change this behaviour in v6.
I don’t think I have another solution to the naming.
Currently the 3D view and STEP export are consistent and the orientation of the exported board is usable. I’d be very annoyed if suddenly the board were exported in the X-Z plane because I insisted “PCB font view” coincided with “3D model front perspective”.
Maybe it would be worth revisiting the “front” and “back” nomenclature someday - Eagle uses the terms “top” and “bottom”, what about Altium and other tools?
Finally, it appears we can agree on one thing: there shouldn’t be ambiguity when it comes to handedness of the coordinate system. As CAD, 3D printing and maths backgrounds suggest Z = height, this leads to the following icons:
I’m fighting with myself whether to include X+ , X- etc. signs but always come to the conclusion that the information is already there and presented in a systematic way with the curl depictions.
Duplicate and copy suggest gray = old, blue = new.
Also see the old Create Array icon here:
So… it’s odd that “create array” looks more like “select one of multiple identical items”. Maybe that’s just me, but I think the colors are the wrong way round and the size difference also isn’t doing it for me.
The icon set is slowly (or not so slowly) but steadily going from pretty good to very good. There’s only one big gripe for me, the red “warning signs” which has been mentioned several times. The rest are small details.
I don’t know why I pay so much attention to the normal/dim non-active layer icon, but it annoys me because the blue color is so close to gray that they look like continuous color tracks with a slash on top of them. It would work better if the two blue tracks were replaced with brighter colors and the gray with lighter. They don’t need to be the B.Cu color because the icon is for all layers, not just copper.
Fill all and Unfill all icons aren’t compatible with other zone related icons.
“Fabrication outputs” main icon is messy, it doesn’t seem to represent anything concrete or abstract.
Hotkeys is probably meant to represent a keyboard but doesn’t look like one. Just plain dull keyboard might be better.
And then the red warning signs.
… and some others.
First, there are some where the small sub-icon isn’t clear. These are at least:
The link icon which looks like a tilted ninja smiley. The ninja’s eyes don’t look like intertwined chain links at all like links in all other icon sets do (compare with the link in this forum’s edit window).
The magnifier on the footprint. Its handle can’t be seen properly. And red isn’t good for a magnifier.
The pen. It looks like a line and dot, not a pen.
The eye. It’s much smaller than the eye in the Appearance panel and doesn’t look so much like an eye especially with the red color.
The “new” plus+X icon. It doesn’t remind me of the original idea of shining of new (which is usually yellow in icons). I couldn’t tell what it is unless I knew.
Some would be better with a different color. Why not use for example green for all import/export/add balls? And toned down orange instead of red for some others. The reasons for using different colors have been said already: red looks like a warning sign, it draws too much attention; the icons could be differentiated by different colors; and red just isn’t fitting for some ideas which the sub-icons represent.
What makes the red warning signs issue particularly terrible is that it puts what is important to discern onto 20% of the icon area, while the repeating part that one can sometimes even infer takes up the remaining 80%. They’re obfuscating, not clarifying.
Just as a thought experiment, I imagine one could put a little B/W symbol in the top-left corner and dedicate the majority of the icon to what it actually means.
Given the number if warning sign symbols… I suspect we’ll be victims of “it is this now forever”, aka too big to redo.
Another aspect perhaps previously recognized is a severe limit in feature size:
vs.
The line width needs to be like that in the arrows, the “+” + “x” symbol isn’t doing it.
Has anyone tried the inverse: using white circles with red symbols in them?
Ok… that doesn’t work so well. To me it seems like a detail of the parent icon is highlighted.
We’re first working on the toolbar icons that are visible on all platforms. Once we are happy with those and they are not changing anymore, there are all the icons that only show up in menus (on platforms where that works, and when users have the “icons in menus” enabled). There are many more of those icons, and they are less important since they show up next to text. So, we are not prioritizing keeping them “up to date” with changes while the changes to the overall design language are still ongoing.
What do you think about these annotate icons? (added small gap to make ?? -> 42 more distinct and replaced the red arrow with a constrasty black downward triangle).
