What's Good About Allegro PCB Editor GUI updates? See for Yourself in 16.5!

The 16.5 Allegro PCB Editor release contains several updates to the Graphical User Interface (GUI) to increase your efficiency and productivity in using the product.

Read on for more details...

Status Bar updates

Functional responses can be obtained by clicking fields in the status bar. For example, the field indicating the current subclass can be selected and changed to a new class/subclass. This is a good alternative to opening the Options Form over in the side panel.

Class / Subclass

In previous releases the subclass panel has reflected the active subclass of the design when the etch class is active, and has been blank in other situations. New in 16.5 is a hover prompt indicating “Active class and subclass - Click to select.” Clicking on this field produces a popup that enables you to change the active class/subclass setting from a list. In addition, the field itself will list the subclass for all classes, as well as the class name when a non-etch class is active:

Application Mode

In previous releases, the application mode provided a read-only abbreviated indication of the currently active app mode (e.g. “GEN” for General edit). In 16.5, the full application mode is spelled out and the hover prompt shows “Application Mode is <App Mode Name>. Click to select”. As with class/subclass, clicking on this field produces a selectable popup listing all available application modes. Subsequently selecting one of those will put Allegro into that application mode:

 
Super Filter

The text “Click to select” is appended to the hover prompt for this field, and clicking it will result in a selectable popup listing possible super filter values for you to assign:

Number of Selections

A new field at the far right of the status bar panel indicates how many objects are presently selected in the canvas, along with the prompt text “Number of selected objects.” This is also be a selectable field, with a popup offering you the following options previously available only within the app mode RMB “Selection set” popup:

• Clear all selections
• Select by Polygon
• (When multiple selections) Narrow select (has a pull-right to select object type for selection filtering)
• Object browser. . . (brings up the Find by Name / Property dialog)
• (When multiple selections) Select (has a pull-right to filter selection to an individual object)
• (When multiple selections) Toggle select (has a pull-right to highlight individual objects without deselecting the others)

Polygon Select Done

The polygon select command has been enhanced to automatically finish on a double LMB click. This is similar to selecting “done."

Zoom Button in Pick Dialog

A “Zoom” button has been added to the “pick dialog” to allow application mode user access to the zoom center command:

As always, I appreciate your feedback on how you're using these new 16.5 capabilites in Allegro PCB Editor.

Jerry "GenPart" Grzenia