I agree with Olin on this one. At the moment, at work we use Ultiboard
and Multisim, from the Electronics Workbech people. I have never been
so frustrated at a piece of professional software in my life. For
something that they sell as a "package" it's a joke. Clearly they've
bought someone out and then stuck the two packages together, however
they never bothered to do any work on them to harmonize the user
interface. Even little things like zoom working differently between
the two products is really frustrating. In Multisim, most of the time
when you're drawing connections between components, it won't follow
the lines you're drawing. You get to the end, and it reroutes the
wire. If I try and connect a resistor and a ground symbol, and they're
one grid unit apart, it won't go straight no matter what I do. My
schematics are all but indeciferable because of this.

Also, the Multisim export to Ultiboard doesn't seem to work, and the
two programs seem to have different libraries. I can add stuff in a
schematic (from the supplied library), only to have it show up as
undefined in the board. And there's no easy way to go back and forth
to make modifications. I love how Eagle works that way.

I wanted to get us onto Eagle, but it was dismissed (though I'm not
sure why). We spent a ton of money on Orcad, and I'm slowly learning
it. Too soon to make a comment, other than I don't think it's as bad
as Multisim/Ultiboard.

One other thing I don't understand is that as far as I know,
Electronics Workbench have been in the schematic business longer than
the board business...and Ultiboard is at least usable. Using Multisim
is like trying to get a four year old to go to bed on time. Very
frustrating.

Josh
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A common mistake that people make when trying to design something
completely foolproof is to underestimate the ingenuity of complete
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On Mon, 27 Dec 2004 13:43:23 -0500, Olin Lathrop
<olin_piclist@embedinc.com> wrote:
> Roy J. Gromlich wrote:
> > On the other hand, PADs has one very nice feature which I really
> > miss in Eagle - it can scan the schematic file and the PCB file and
> > produce a list of differences, and then allow you to resolve those
> > individually (if you want) in either direction.  That is, make the PCB
> > match the schematic for some items and the schematic match the
> > PCB for others.  Or change both simultaneously.
> 
> Eagle handles this in a better way, in my opinion, by making it so that the
> schematic and board are never out of sync unless you do something deliberate
> and stupid.  Even then you can run DRC and get a list of discrepencies,
> although you get a lot of other barf to wade thru too.  This tightly
> integrated approach is one of the thing I really like about Eagle.
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