Anyone using this little piece of crap to enter schematics? The thing crashes ALL THE TIME when I try to configure the "CIS configuration" to access our database. The thing is unusable. This is in SPB 15.7 and 16.0 with the latest patches...
The online help is unusable. Unreadable, rather. Circular definitions, useless help, detailed explanations of menu items that don't tell you what they're FOR.
The pitiful quality of commercial electronics CAD software blows my mind.
Sounds like it was written by M$, ESPECIALLY the "help" section.
Yeah, it's (unfortunately) quite common in the world.
Agreed, I've noticed the same thing -- it's clear that a lot of the help was written by people who have no clue how the program really works.
Yet Cadence did spend the time and money to make it all *prettier* in the past few releases. What a waste...
There is plenty of competition out there, and relatively little correlation between price and quality, but what holds back the industry is the large investment companies have in their libraries and training of users. As another thread mentioned recently, in the mechanical engineering world, any serious CAD program can import and export AutoCAD-format files, so even if you change software, there's usually not much of a problem dealing with all your legacy drawings from the old program, whereas in the EDA world it seems that vendors go out of their way to *not* use the same file formats as anyone else, seemingly in an attempt to force you to really feel the pain if you ever leave.
Even modern, otherwise-pretty-good software like Pulsonix does this: The file formats are 100% undocumented binary blobs and there's no indication this will ever change. IMO it's really borderline unethical, and the response of, "well, we *import* many different competitors' files" (...with varying degrees of success...) doesn't change this.
---Joel
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