From: joeyj@hspice.portal.com (Joseph P. Jarosz)
Subject: Re: GED/Concept moving to Composer
Keywords: valid composer ged concept
Organization: Meta - Software
X-Newsreader: Tin 1.1 PL4
Distribution: na
Date: Fri, 9 Oct 1992 22:00:06 GMT

In article <2053@gvgspd.GVG.TEK.COM> markg@gvgdsd.GVG.TEK.COM (Mark Gydesen) writes:
>
>My personal comments... I have "grown up" with ged and now concept, I am
>very partial to the user interface and easy of use. From what I have
>seen of Composer, it looks to be cumbersome and has some fundemental
>weekness (ie not able to move the corner of a box to resize a body for
>instance). Concept is the product of a lot of user input and company
>devotion, and as the bugs get worked out, it seems to be a VERY good
>schematic capture tool, having a lot of inhancements over GED. On the
>flip side of this though, Valid's rules checking and database has not
>kept up, do in part to compatibility of previous versions. I am looking
>forward to using Cadence's process manager and SKILL, the user interface
>will catch up later as more GED/Concept features are added to Composer.
>

Just to defend Composer a bit, if you strip away a lot of the additional
functionality Cadence adds to support every type of user, the user interface
of the program becomes very intuitive. Like Concept, Composer (or at least
the schematic editor portion of the product) was created utilizing much user
input as well as knowledge gained from predecessor products.

Here's a few hints that will make life easier:

1) Never run in novice mode. The people who defined "novice" mode didn't
   know what they were doing. Last time I checked, novice mode would pop-up
   the "Option Menu" for every interactive command. Question: Why show the
   user every possible way they can create a wire if they are a novice? Why
   not use a common sense default?

2) In Composer's schematic editor, whenever you are in an interactive command
   you can hit the 'F3' key (unless they changed it) to pop-up the "Option
   Menu". This will show the many different options you can use if you
   choose to.

3) If you want to quickly create your schematic's connectivity and come back
   later to make it "pretty", use the "flight-line" option of the create wire
   command. It lets you define the end-points of the "logical" wire without
   having to add bends in the middle. It will draw these "flight lines"
   as dashed red lines (sort of a rats nest approach). At any time you
   can select everything in the schematic and execute the "route flight line
   command" to have the system auto-route the wires for you.

   This can considerably speed your development cycle up since the "pretty"
   wires are not necessary for the netlister to work, it only cares about
   the logical "connectivity".

thanx,
joey


Newsgroups: comp.cad.cadence
Subject: Re: GED/Concept moving to Composer
Distribution: na
Organization: Meta - Software
Keywords: valid composer ged concept

In article <2053@gvgspd.GVG.TEK.COM> markg@gvgdsd.GVG.TEK.COM (Mark Gydesen) writes:
>
>My personal comments... I have "grown up" with ged and now concept, I am
>very partial to the user interface and easy of use. From what I have
>seen of Composer, it looks to be cumbersome and has some fundemental
>weekness (ie not able to move the corner of a box to resize a body for
>instance). Concept is the product of a lot of user input and company
>devotion, and as the bugs get worked out, it seems to be a VERY good
>schematic capture tool, having a lot of inhancements over GED. On the
>flip side of this though, Valid's rules checking and database has not
>kept up, do in part to compatibility of previous versions. I am looking
>forward to using Cadence's process manager and SKILL, the user interface
>will catch up later as more GED/Concept features are added to Composer.
>

Just to defend Composer a bit, if you strip away a lot of the additional
functionality Cadence adds to support every type of user, the user interface
of the program becomes very intuitive. Like Concept, Composer (or at least
the schematic editor portion of the product) was created utilizing much user
input as well as knowledge gained from predecessor products.

Here's a few hints that will make life easier:

1) Never run in novice mode. The people who defined "novice" mode didn't
   know what they were doing. Last time I checked, novice mode would pop-up
   the "Option Menu" for every interactive command. Question: Why show the
   user every possible way they can create a wire if they are a novice? Why
   not use a common sense default?

2) In Composer's schematic editor, whenever you are in an interactive command
   you can hit the 'F3' key (unless they changed it) to pop-up the "Option
   Menu". This will show the many different options you can use if you
   choose to.

3) If you want to quickly create your schematic's connectivity and come back
   later to make it "pretty", use the "flight-line" option of the create wire
   command. It lets you define the end-points of the "logical" wire without
   having to add bends in the middle. It will draw these "flight lines"
   as dashed red lines (sort of a rats nest approach). At any time you
   can select everything in the schematic and execute the "route flight line
   command" to have the system auto-route the wires for you.

   This can considerably speed your development cycle up since the "pretty"
   wires are not necessary for the netlister to work, it only cares about
   the logical "connectivity".

thanx,
joey


-- 
********************************************************************************
* Joey Jarosz (my opinions are my own, and boy do I have a lot them!)          *
* joeyj@hspice.portal.com                                                      *
********************************************************************************
Newsgroups: comp.cad.cadence