I have been working with the December pre-release, and have just downloaded the Jan3 version. Here are my observations from a usability perspective.
Firstly, thank you for the duplicate project feature, version control is now easy.
The December version of the schematic capture program had some bugs, but those have now been fixed. The ability to type C, and duplicate a component multiple times is a nice feature.
My one gripe is that up to v4, if you typed C in the component selector, you would come up with C, C_small, Cp, and Cp_small on the first pane. If you type C now, you come up with C – which I never use, and I end up typing ‘small’ or ‘polarized’ to select a capacitor. This is not productive, and a fix would be appreciated.
The hotkey pane in Preferences does not show the keys in any particular order. When I changed C back to ‘duplicate component’ from ‘wire selection’ in the December version, it was tedious trying to find the appropriate hotkey to change. An alphabetic listing would help.
The pcb layout program has nice new graphics, you can see a component on top of a top plane, and the new trace movement method is nicer.
There is one issue that I consider a bug. If you click ‘Delete footprints with no symbols’, in the Update PCB selection, you delete the mounting holes as well as the unused components, which is annoying. If you don’t, you can end up with duplicate components, in addition to components that are no longer in the schematic. I ended up with 2 J5’s while working with the December release. My suggestion, give mounting holes a pad number of 0, and don’t delete them.
There is a feature that would be nice to have. When using the Text tool, the size and layer selections return to default each time you open it. Since I name multiple connectors while completing a board, this is frustrating. If the changes were retained within a session – not to disk, that would be a great convenience.
Overall, nice work, and I look forward to the finished product.
