PCB-ST Lite 4+

POSITIVE:

It's fairly easy to use has even orrientation arrows to rotate the circuit. I tried about 5 differrent PCB apps for Windows and all were dificult to do or didn't lend them selves to very well.

NEGATIVE:
in the descript states can only do 100 Pins I am creating a very simple 12VDC Breakout board to feed 16 devices so that is 32 + 2 pins for the Terminal Block connectors and then 32 solder points for 16 PPTC PolySwitch Resettable Fuse 34 + 32 = 66 now need to create all the traces here were I have exceded my limit and can save the layout.

Other Issue but this seems to be with all the PCB apps none have Terminal Block Connectors or PPTC's so have to just draw the layout manually and once get the componets mesure the spacing between Pins and adjust the diagram.

This is not good software. It’s got all the features you need, but it’s not intuitive at all. You need to have the manual at your side at all times. It’s filled with screenshots from mac os 4 and instructions for floppy drives, so it’s not that reliable. There’s undocumented weirdness that may have you talking to tech support (why do they have money to pay for tech support but no money to pay for quality software development to make useful software that doesn’t require it?). The lite version limits you to design “complexity”, but it’s not really complexity, the guys on the phone will explain to you implementation details of the software (Oh my. I’m an SDE. That’s bad.) in order for you to make a successful project. Which is to say that you need to build as much into library objects as possible because it works around the lazily implemented Lite version complexity limitation. And that itself is actually a hack, using the software how it was not intended to be used. So much for the educational purpose of it. By the way, speaking of which, don’t pay for the education upgrade, because it doesn’t increase the complexity limit by even one component. There are other pieces of software like this - Sibelius comes to mind. It’s made by people that know a ton about what the software can create, but not a lot about making software. Features just end up put in weird places. Get this - in order to set a font size, you have to hold option when you click the edit menu in order for the menu option to appear. What would MS Word look like with features like that? The McCAD website is still from the 90’s. And look, in the 90’s, there was a lot of software like this. But it’s time to change or move on. There’s no forum or other documentation. Theoretically, if you used this for dozens of projects, you’d learn it and be fine. Until you go on vacation and forget. I will use something else for my next PCB design.

Beats everything I have tried before. Comes with huge footprint library and I can easily add more. Very intuitive.