| General > General Technical Chat |
| LTspice on Mac. Argh. |
| << < (5/5) |
| bd139:
To be fair to LTspice, the UI conventions for windows, which are extremely well defined, were violated terribly as well. It's a proper clunky pile of crap. But it's the best clunky pile of crap we have for the money so we have to live with it. The issue is really that no one with the required level of experience at designing user interfaces was involved in the project. Still it beats my early days with SPICE which were on SunOS 4, with manual schematic capture (do it on paper then input it) then do manual plots. |
| tooki:
--- Quote from: bd139 on April 02, 2020, 12:20:12 pm ---To be fair to LTspice, the UI conventions for windows, which are extremely well defined, were violated terribly as well. It's a proper clunky pile of crap. But it's the best clunky pile of crap we have for the money so we have to live with it. --- End quote --- Well, compared to Apple’s human interface guidelines for classic Mac OS and early versions of Mac OS X, the Windows guidelines are adequate at best, definitely not “extremely well defined”. But at least they have guidelines. What sucks on Windows is that developers don’t feel any responsibility to adhere to them, so they just ignore them and to their own thing, reducing UI consistency between apps. In contrast, Mac software tends to follow the conventions a lot more faithfully, which is really what makes Macs easier to use: most apps, no matter who wrote them, behave consistently enough that you can just sit down and use them. --- Quote from: bd139 on April 02, 2020, 12:20:12 pm ---The issue is really that no one with the required level of experience at designing user interfaces was involved in the project. --- End quote --- Classic “let the developers design the UI” problems. Since programmers by definition do not represent the computer skills of the 99%, they tend to make radically different assumptions, and end up designing UIs that don’t make sense to non-programmers. Even worse, UI-wise, is software designed by engineers (especially, though not exclusively, engineers of things other than software), because they’re not only not programmers or UI designers, they tend to be very, very, well... math-nerd-like. So you end up with tools that are utterly unusable to non-experts, with the certain aloofness a lot of us nerdy types have, completely oblivious to the unapproachability of their software designs. I expect that LTspice (or spice in general) was born this way. |
| GlennSprigg:
Here's some equivalents for a Mac, including 'MacSpice'. https://formac.informer.com/circuit-wizard I just use Circuit Wizard for Windows, as my 'current' brain can't handle more complex software!! :D |
| SilverSolder:
--- Quote from: bd139 on April 02, 2020, 12:20:12 pm ---To be fair to LTspice, the UI conventions for windows, which are extremely well defined, were violated terribly as well. It's a proper clunky pile of crap. But it's the best clunky pile of crap we have for the money so we have to live with it. The issue is really that no one with the required level of experience at designing user interfaces was involved in the project. Still it beats my early days with SPICE which were on SunOS 4, with manual schematic capture (do it on paper then input it) then do manual plots. --- End quote --- Once you get used to LTSpice, it is extremely fast to work with. But you do have to learn a number of masonic handshakes to get to that point. |
| Navigation |
| Message Index |
| Previous page |