PCB design KiCAD and Amphour #149. re: Altium rant

[wilfred]

/.

[c4757p]

Although why it is called the AmpHour when it runs 2 Amps hours I don't know.

Dave draws 350mA and Chris draws 150mA.

[HackedFridgeMagnet]

Those amp hour names? They certainly make it hard to find stuff.

In regards to Kicad, I tend to have more issues with Altium reader than Kicad. I don't have normal Altium.

The other day I tried to open a schematic in Altium reader by double clicking on it.
Altuim duly opened up, it told me useful things like I was working in offline mode and that I should register, gave me a list of other schematics and designs that I may want to look at, but no sign of the schematic I actually wanted to see.

It turned out the .sch file was probably an Eagle schematic not Altium, but no message to the effect that file is wrong format and the file didn't open.
Bad UI is not restricted to open source.

[c4757p]

Using "sch" as an extension for a schematic file is idiotic. KiCad does it, too. What, do you pay by the extension letter? Is your program MS-DOS compatible?

[HackedFridgeMagnet]

Actually it seems Altium uses .schdoc as the suffix.  I don't know how Altium reader was given the file association for that file type on my system, but it's fixed now.
It seems Altium has taken your advice, but kept .sch for backwards compatibility.

I guess really the preferable thing would be the linux/unix way where the file's type/usage data is kept out of the name.

Apparently one of the other schematic design tools has gone with the .dsn suffix. I don't think that's going to help much either.
I noticed that kicad recently changed it's layout design file suffix to .kicad_pcb, which couldn't really be any clearer.