Elegant Invention Blog

The main window is beginning to take shape! What you’re looking at here is two views into the same “page.” A page, in Qt terms, is a scene which contains items. Changes to the scene are reflected in all views, it is like looking at the same object from multiple points of view.

The main window is now tabbed. Presently each tab is tied to a particular page, which represents either a schematic sheet or a board. You can split the view in the tab numerous ways, vertically and horizontally. Making the addition and removable of splits intuitive won’t be trivial, but hopefully the end result will be simple and easy to use.

I think this feature will be most useful when doing board layout on a large and/or dense board, where you want a “supervisory” zoomed-out view of the entire board, along with a tightly zoomed-in view of what you’re currently working on. I don’t think it will find much use in schematic capture, but it can be used for either.

There’s one philosophy I will try to apply throughout the implementation of eiCAD: Every feature in an application should be intuitive for the novice, but customizable for the expert. That is to say: anyone should be able to start using an application as-is with little or no prior study, but the advanced user should be able to adjust every feature as they see fit, knowing exactly how they want the application to look and behave. Put another way: the application can assume it is smarter than the user, but only so long as its “intelligence” can be modified or disabled.

A good example of this is that modern smartphones, by default, auto-correct typos on the fly. This is a fantastic feature for most people, as those on-screen keyboards can be a bit tough to work with, and the built-in dictionaries are quite good. For some people though, whether it be a frequent use of uncommon words or a general distaste for machines that believe they’re smarter than the user, these automated “corrections” may not seem like corrections at all! In that case the feature should always have the ability to be tweaked (perhaps load a more appropriate dictionary), or disabled entirely.