First I should apologize to the list, Adam and Xiaofan in particular - I
was very grumpy today!

William "Chops" Westfield wrote:
> Do you remember which version you tried back then?  IMHO, it went  
> from "rather horrible" to "not bad at all" sometime around version  
> 4.0, when they de-emphasized the command line commands in favor of  
> GUI buttons.  4.1 yielded additional improvements (and a version for  
> MacOSX!)  People still complain about its failure to conform to  
> standardized GUI tropes ("cut" does copy, "copy" does duplicate), but  
> those are mostly beginners who haven't got used to the idea that a  
> schematics/PCB package must be a bit more complex  than your usual  
> drawing program.

It was right around 4.0 that I was trying it out. It was clunky and the
GUI didn't do much.

> Version 5 is in beta test; it looks like it may be there for a while,  
> but Cadsoft is responding to complaints (even from the likes of me)  
> relatively quickly.  I'd have to say that the pace and responsiveness  
> of Cadsoft to bug reports and feature requests is one of the points  
> in EAGLE's favor.  Some (a lot?) of the other packages seem to have  
> devolved into one-man efforts that barely keep up with changes in the  
> computing environment (people still occasionally recommending DOS  
> programs!) and open source tends to have the usual open source issues  
> ("write the feature yourself; we're too busy trying to get it to  
> compile with gcc 4.2 and the new version of gnugraphlib-92.1")

I'm glad they continue to improve it. I imagine it'll be pretty nice
right about the time the value of the dollar makes it unaffordable :)

Cheerful regards,

Bob
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