Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/942744
36 DESIGN007 MAGAZINE I FEBRUARY 2018 are staring at this product, teas- ing out their thoughts and rout- ing traces, hours and hours on end at the end of the day. It can actually be detrimental, even to their health and stress levels if the tools they're using are frus- trating in any way or difficult to look at. One of the major things we've done for Altium Designer 18 is to actually observe our custom- ers. We noticed they stare at screens for long periods, and we had this epiphany that a dark color theme was a very good thing. Engineers do it in all their text editors, so why not make it available in the actual schematic and PCB editor as well, and make a departure from the traditional shades of gray Windows user interface colors? So, with Altium Designer 18, we've gone with a dark background theme and a high contrast menu system where the text is much easier to see and requires less effort to find what you need. We've also done a lot of work to consoli- date the menus and functions within Altium Designer, because like any mature product that is growing over time and has a lot of different elements, we did a lot of analysis both from analytics from the software's product improve- ment program, but also from our yearly cus- tomer surveys. Shaughnessy: How often do you communicate with your users? Jordan: We do survey customers every year, and our development team, the actual people writing the software, are involved on our cus- tomer forums. On the forums, users are bru- tally honest and vent their frustrations or sing praises depending on what they have encoun- tered that day. Plus, we have the analytics engine. It's optional, and most people opt out of it, but a good chunk of people stay involved because they want to make the product better. Through all of that, we have been able to see areas in the software that could be improved in usability just by removing some things or by consolidat- ing others. Something else users will notice with Designer 18: There were dozens of modal dia- logues for object properties, and each one of them was dif- ferent. If you double-clicked on a pad, you'd get the pad properties dialogue and then you could edit all the different characteristics of that one pad that you'd selected, or you could double-click on a via or a track segment or a component. It was the same in schematic as well. All of those dialogues were modal, meaning you couldn't do anything else anywhere else in the software until you'd close them or hit OK. They would obscure the work space view. Something else we noticed is more and more engineers and designers are just using a lap- top, and we've built the software platform to work very well across multiple monitors. Hav- ing modal dialogues pop up in the way of the schematic or PCB editor all the time becomes frustrating when you just have one screen. We've replaced all of those with a single, uni- fied properties panel that allows you to stay in the editor workspace but make changes in one place. It's basically one common UI that's easy to learn for editing any kind of object proper- ties or groups of objects, if you multiple select them or if you use a selection filter, and select a big group of items with the selection filter, which is also something we've added that we didn't have before. We had a philosophi- cal battle over that for years but we finally did it because users want a selection filter. Think about it: P-CAD had it, but Altium Designer didn't. The other thing, and this is pretty big news, is that Altium Designer 18 is the first version that we have removed all the FPGA design capabili- ties from. We had a really awesome idea and I think it was a brilliant product that was great for people like me who do a bit of everything. I'm a systems' engineer who happens to also Ben Jordan, Altium