EAGLE 9: so close, and yet so far

[zwhite]

Since you force me to post this publically, here's my feedback on EAGLE 9 and why I still can't upgrade from EAGLE 7.

The big things:

Managed libraries don't work for me at all, and it seems I can't do most 3d models without them. This means that the (stupid, annoying, broken, frustrating, yet functional) ecad.io website is still a better way to get from EAGLE to Fusion 360. 

I tried to use managed libraries in Chrome, and I just get an infinitely reloading page. (Screenshot attached.) Clearing cookies and doing a force refresh didn't fix it. It works if I use Safari, but then I get a message saying "For A More Optimal Experience Try Chrome." Chrome didn't seem like an Optimal experience to me...

Ok, so skip that for now and go back to my library editor. I play around with the 3d pane in the browser. Looks like I can generate 3d models for common footprints. Great! Except I can't associate them with my existing footprints. Boo! Boo hiss! You want me to manually generate dozens of 3d models and then manually replace my footprints in devices? There is no migration path for your long-time users? This does not instill confidence in me, and makes me wonder what else you plan to break for me in the future under the guise of helping me.

OK, well let's move on to 3d models for complex parts. I find that I can import a 3d model from web, which seems to be an in-app WebView of the library.io site I was being frustrated by earlier. I go back to the website to try to upload a model for one of my parts that has a model available online (https://github.com/qmk/qmk_hardware/tree/master/components). Only, now I have a new problem. I can't upload a .stp file. What 3d formats does it accept? Apparently I have to guess until I get it right, but this is where I get off. I'm done, no more torture for me.

The Fusion 360 integration was one of the primary reasons I was looking at EAGLE 9, but it's a huge step backward from EAGLE 7 and ecad.io, which I hate a lot. Not only is it not usable, but trying to move in this direction I would lose functionality I rely on today and I'm looking at a week or more of busy work just to get back to parity.

The small things:

I downloaded EAGLE 9 from the autodesk homepage. After installing I was immediately prompted to upgrade to 9.0.1. Which has the exact same install process I just went through. Why wasn't I directed to download 9.0.1 in the first place?

User hostile changes all over the place. Seriously bad UX.

It took me a hour of fiddling before I finally got my board view looking correct (no big grey box surrounding it.) At first I thought I could just turn off Detect Board Shape, but that breaks Fusion 360 linking. Then I had to google to figure out that I needed to change that color, but the interface for doing so is confusing and unintuitive. Cue 50 minutes of playing with colors, clicking OK (why no apply button? Why no live updating?) and then repeating the same 8 steps over and over until I finally figured out which color I needed to change.

That new Cmd-L assign is ominous. Are you planning to remove the CLI in the future?

What happened to wire bend styles 3 and 4? Why doesn't wire routing behave properly?

What's with these tab indicators and lack of borders around widgets like lists? They are hard to see and hard to interpret, and worse they're ugly. I don't expect my ECAD tool to look good, but don't go out of your way to make it worse the way you have.

Overall:

You've done a great job of adding features I really want to use. Now stop breaking the features I rely on! Go fix 3d models. This should be done entirely inside EAGLE, not on a website with bad UX.

[rachaelATWH4]

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@zwhitewrote:

Since you force me to post this publically, here's my feedback on EAGLE 9 and why I still can't upgrade from EAGLE 7.

The big things:

Managed libraries <snip...>

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I wish I could disagree here but I also don't use managed libraries for the reasons you state and several more. The whole splitting of functionality between local and online and the very tortuous way you need to work using both places in a specific way to keep everything in sync is completely unworkable for me. I need everything local and I need to be able to use my own versioning tools (GIT) which integrate with my own systems. Managed libraries prevent me from doing this so I will not use them.

However, you can use regular libraries and just ignore all the managed stuff. Remove all the managed libraries from view and tell it to delete them all and then you shouldn't need to worry about it, apart from not being able to access the Fusion 360 integration.

There is a workaround, but it is a little cumbersome and not at all ideal. You can take a copy of your design and use exp-lbrs.ulp to extract all the used libraries to a single library and generate a replace script to update the board with the library. Before you run the replace script, make that new combined library managed and add your 3D models (STEP should work btw, not sure why you had problems there), and then once everything is set up and online and local are in sync (you need to pull any online changes locally to ensure it has all the correct managed library 3D package stuff) then you run your replace script. Now you can push you board to Fusion360.

When you want to un-manage your board you can either revert to your original before you copied it, or save it in the v7 format which will strip out any managed libraries stuff. If you make sure you disable the new library I think a library update should then put your old libraries back but I haven't tested this so I'm not 100% sure.

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@zwhitewrote:

The small things:

It took me a hour of fiddling before I finally got my board view looking correct (no big grey box surrounding it.) At first I thought I could just turn off Detect Board Shape, but that breaks Fusion 360 linking. Then I had to google to figure out that I needed to change that color, but the interface for doing so is confusing and unintuitive. Cue 50 minutes of playing with colors, clicking OK (why no apply button? Why no live updating?) and then repeating the same 8 steps over and over until I finally figured out which color I needed to change. 

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I think if you had just run defaultcolours.scr it might have made things acceptable more quickly. I'm assuming you had the issue we all originally had when the board shape feature came in 8.3 in which the light grey outside the board obscured the grid and looked generally nasty. People with legacy settings from older versions of EAGLE still see the old colours by default I believe. They have been improved a lot since that release, and fortunately now the colour of that outer isn't tied to the same fixed colour as anything else (which is was originally).

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@zwhitewrote:

That new Cmd-L assign is ominous. Are you planning to remove the CLI in the future? 

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It's not ominous, although I admit I was quite wary initially too. It's because the original concept of the command line always being active doesn't work now we have the design manager which also requires keyboard input. Fortunately I managed to adapt to this change ok, although I do occasionally still not remember to Cmd+L before I type a command and end up having to type it again.

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@zwhitewrote:

What happened to wire bend styles 3 and 4? Why doesn't wire routing behave properly?

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It's because there is a new auto-bend feature where it tries to guess what you want. It works ok but there are definitely times where the old way is quicker and I hope they put in some improvements to this so we can have a bit more control over it. Right click to cycle bend styles and Cmd+Right click to toggle between bend pairs still work btw.

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@zwhitewrote:

What's with these tab indicators and lack of borders around widgets like lists? They are hard to see and hard to interpret, and worse they're ugly. I don't expect my ECAD tool to look good, but don't go out of your way to make it worse the way you have.

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When I first saw the new UI I wasn't a fan, but it's grown on me now and am liking a lot of the UI changes. In 9.0.1 things are better, there were lots of padding issues and missing features from tabs and borders in 9.0.0 which are now implemented. I agree things aren't as clear as they were previously in some places and it probably doesn't look as nice on my Mac than it previously did in some areas too but I think they can probably improve it and fix these issues. Updating an entire UI across three platforms is likely quite a large task so I am not surprised it wasn't completely perfect on first release. I don't know how it looks on Windows / Linux, I haven't booted up those VM's and tested it yet. I suspect it'll look better on Windows 10 than it did previously as the flatter look seems very Microsoft like to me.

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@zwhitewrote:

Overall:

You've done a great job of adding features I really want to use. Now stop breaking the features I rely on! Go fix 3d models. This should be done entirely inside EAGLE, not on a website with bad UX.

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I think a lot of the new features are excellent, especially from 8.3 onwards things started to get really much better with impressive new features each major release. With v9.0 there are a lot of really positive changes which make doing large designs much better. I stuck with v7.7 for actual proper designs for quite a while, using v8 only for evaluation/testing but I moved over to it around v8.5 and now with all the latest changes I will not be going back to v7. 

Best Regards,

Rachael

[zwhite]

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@rachaelATWH4wrote:

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I wish I could disagree here but I also don't use managed libraries for the reasons you state and several more. The whole splitting of functionality between local and online and the very tortuous way you need to work using both places in a specific way to keep everything in sync is completely unworkable for me. I need everything local and I need to be able to use my own versioning tools (GIT) which integrate with my own systems. Managed libraries prevent me from doing this so I will not use them.

OMG yes, I didn't even talk about how that makes my git stuff harder. I have a library I generate from a python script, no way I can do this with all the online nonsense: https://github.com/skullydazed/clueboard_eagle

However, you can use regular libraries and just ignore all the managed stuff. Remove all the managed libraries from view and tell it to delete them all and then you shouldn't need to worry about it, apart from not being able to access the Fusion 360 integration.

The Fusion 360 integration is the hill I've chosen to die on here. 🙂 With EAGLE 7 I have a working, albeit tedious and annoying, path from EAGLE to Fusion 360. If I can't use 3d without managed libraries, and I can't use managed libraries because this online stuff is so broken, and the ecad.io integration has been removed, then I have no path from EAGLE 9 to Fusion 360.

There is a workaround, but it is a little cumbersome and not at all ideal. You can take a copy of your design and use exp-lbrs.ulp to extract all the used libraries to a single library and generate a replace script to update the board with the library. Before you run the replace script, make that new combined library managed and add your 3D models (STEP should work btw, not sure why you had problems there), and then once everything is set up and online and local are in sync (you need to pull any online changes locally to ensure it has all the correct managed library 3D package stuff) then you run your replace script. Now you can push you board to Fusion360.

I once had a coworker who liked to respond to workflows like that with a sarcastic, "Yeah? Well (*fill in the blank*) you too!" The idea being that forcing the user to do that is no different from finding them and telling them to do anatomically improbable acts. I tried very hard not to reference this idea, but the more I dig into EAGLE 9 the more his voice rings in my head.

This also doesn't solve the orientation problem. The SOIC8 I generated is oriented differently than the SOIC8 footprint I've been using for years. So not only do I have to go through the procedure you outline, but then I have to figure out how to reorient every single use of that footprint.

And finally, on the .stp problem, based on the behavior it was clearly a case where they added an accept= attribute to the file upload that did not include .stp, because I couldn't even select it in the file upload box.

I think if you had just run defaultcolours.scr it might have made things acceptable more quickly. I'm assuming you had the issue we all originally had when the board shape feature came in 8.3 in which the light grey outside the board obscured the grid and looked generally nasty. People with legacy settings from older versions of EAGLE still see the old colours by default I believe. They have been improved a lot since that release, and fortunately now the colour of that outer isn't tied to the same fixed colour as anything else (which is was originally).

How am I supposed to know to run defaultcolors.scr? There is no documentation to help the EAGLE 7 user adapt to EAGLE 9.

It's because there is a new auto-bend feature where it tries to guess what you want. It works ok but there are definitely times where the old way is quicker and I hope they put in some improvements to this so we can have a bit more control over it. Right click to cycle bend styles and Cmd+Right click to toggle between bend pairs still work btw.

Somehow I've been using EAGLE for 3 years and didn't know I could cmd-click. I've been using right click and shift-right click exclusively. If nothing else comes of this post learning about cmd-right click was worth all my time here. 🙂

When I first saw the new UI I wasn't a fan, but it's grown on me now and am liking a lot of the UI changes. In 9.0.1 things are better, there were lots of padding issues and missing features from tabs and borders in 9.0.0 which are now implemented. I agree things aren't as clear as they were previously in some places and it probably doesn't look as nice on my Mac than it previously did in some areas too but I think they can probably improve it and fix these issues. Updating an entire UI across three platforms is likely quite a large task so I am not surprised it wasn't completely perfect on first release. I don't know how it looks on Windows / Linux, I haven't booted up those VM's and tested it yet. I suspect it'll look better on Windows 10 than it did previously as the flatter look seems very Microsoft like to me.

While I understand that things aren't going to be perfect, right now it's not a question of not getting everything right it's a question of their design intent. I want to be very clear with Autodesk on this point. It's clear that they've reimplemented the GUI and in the process made it faster, which is great. However they also moved from widgets that are native (or emulate native well enough to satisfy me) to widgets that are not, and are following some design fads that are currently on their way out and will very quickly look dated. These design fads (such as the tabs indicated by only a simple line) make the UI harder to see and distinguish while also being subjectively ugly to many people (including me.) This is what I mean by user hostile, they are choosing widgets that are both harder to use and uglier, something which no one is asking for.

I think a lot of the new features are excellent, especially from 8.3 onwards things started to get really much better with impressive new features each major release. With v9.0 there are a lot of really positive changes which make doing large designs much better. I stuck with v7.7 for actual proper designs for quite a while, using v8 only for evaluation/testing but I moved over to it around v8.5 and now with all the latest changes I will not be going back to v7. 

I'm glad it's working for you now. I hope in the future it works for me too.