Monday 7 January 2008

PCB Library browser

Using code from gschem's symbol selection dialog, I've been working on a replacement for pcb's library window. The aim is to target an area where discoverability is perceived as poor for new users, making footprint selection from within pcb an easier task.

There is a little work remaining in tidying up the code, but this dialog will hopefully be a feature of the next pcb release.

Before:


After:

gEDA releases shaping up

Things seem to be shaping up nicely towards having a 1.4.0 stable release of gEDA within the coming month or so, with a great deal of activity in the various GIT trees, and pcb's CVS.

Ales has announced intention to release the second unstable development snapshot in the 1.3.x series on Thursday 1oth Jan, and I'm tentatively planning to match this with an xgsch2pcb 0.1.2 release.

The desktop integration I was working on is mostly finished and committed. We now have MIME icons (original artwork by Tomaz Solc), menu entries and application icons installed with the various gEDA tools. Work remains to add the PCB half of the MIME icons, however there shouldn't be too much work involved in doing this.

The list of blocking bugs for a 1.4.0 release has almost vanished now, so it seems we're all set for a fantastic release. Once 1.3.1 is out, brave users help checking for last minute bugs would be very much appreciated by all.