Any 17.4 users out there?

The internet is a wonderful thing!  This dark mode on an LCD consumes more power than a white screen!  I call BS on Cadence!

Link to source: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/fact-or-fiction-black-is/

Bad Cadence, Bad boy.....

"This is not the case, however, with LCD monitors, which have no phosphors and represent the lion's share of every new monitored purchased in the developed world, including those used by laptops. Instead, LCD displays rely on an array of thin-tube fluorescent bulbs that provide a constant source of light to create a white screen. To make it black, LCDs rely on a diffuser to block this light. As a result, LCDs use more energy than CRTs to display a black screen. Measuring a 17-inch (43-centimeter) LCD monitor, Schindler found that white required 22.6 watts, while black came in a tad higher at 23.2 watts. With a 20-inch (50.8-centimeter) LCD, black required 6 percent more energy than white."

I agree.  It's a holdover from the CRT days. 

All things considered, aren't we clubbing a dead horse though?

The white background on this website causes eyestrain.

After rebuilding their UI, Cadence doesn't want to be the last ones, the slackers, without a dark mode.   

Leave that to MGC P*DS.  Except I'm confident they don't care..

I'm getting eye strain just from reading all this gooble-d-goop.  :)  Have a great weekend all!

Hey there guys, So I have 17.4 up and running on Windows 10 Build 17763.864.

I have to dig in more and will but here are some thoughts.

Capture looks to be running good for me now on win 10. Placing parts etc and doing a normal schematic thus far looks to be working well. On the UI front the skeletal Icons are a change.. Dunno about them yet, some are hard to figure out. I have been figuring them out based on location but no big deal there. The default dark menu for the UI is a little too dark for me as a first blush though I am sure others may like it. I decided to change the dark theme to light via a trip to the "Preferences Menu" but the darn thing wont change to light. I choose light theme but nothing happens it remains dark. I found out that you have to restart capture so capture picks up the Light setting. It would be good if the UI change from dark to light would be dynamic as this may save some confusion.

I do like having the dark theme for creating new symbols though. It makes it much easier to read the menus or symbol pin info. I guess the main thing is we now have a choice so that IMHO is good.

On the left side of the capture window there is a project window now that shows the design tree. See pic below. Capture always had this but now it is showing beside the schematic page. So I want it gone because it is taking up space that is better served by the schematic page itself. I had to play with this for a bit to get it gone. the process was.

Click on the little down arrow and choose "Tabbed Document" This will make the window full-screen. Then click on your schematic page tab and that becomes full screen. You can get into a bit of a rat race bit twiddling the window just to get to have a full screen for your schematic. It does not make any sense to me. Maybe "Close or hide" is out of fashion in menu systems these days, hard to know. If you click the "X" thinking it will close the design tree but leave the schematic page open..."Wrong" that closes everything. !. If you have a dual monitor setup I guess you could make the Design Tree window float and then move it to the other screen.

I have yet to explore the newer features such as design sync and others. Thus far aside from some minor things that I found I think Capture 17.4 is off to a good start.

So now on to Allegro.

Again the skeletal Icons are a TBD :) for me at the moment. One thing about the icons is it is difficult to know if you actually clicked one or not. Anyway the new 17.4 has a feature that I have been after for ever. When you place a symbol "Footprint" on the board the actual footprint shows in the placement window "Yay oh Yay" That's nice to have in particular if you just want to browse symbols. "Thank You Cadence for this"

Allegro also has the design sync that capture has now so it will be interesting to see how that works out. My previous settings for things like macros and settings in the .env file all worked so it was fairly easy to spin up the newer 17.4.

I did run into two issues with 17.4. The first was that "Export Router" aka exporting to Specctra did not work. The command window indicates "Command not found" The second issue was with the display. I am seeing on my hardware a big hit on things like zoom in and out etc. The latency is bad where before these things were instant as in seriously fast with the opengl backend. It seems now when you zoom in there is a refresh between zoom steps. The thing is slow. I am using a modern radeon pro graphic card. It is entirely plausible win 10 is really causing the hit to Allegro's new Skin wrapper, not too sure. Anyway early days yet so I am keeping an open mind.

Anyway that's my experience with 17.4 thus far.

All the best.  

Tyler has this post on Compatibility Mode (along with a lot on the new look and feel) IC Packagers: Welcome to 17.4! Also one on scripting changes (IC Packagers: Scripting Updates in 17.4) and one on the new Via arrays command (IC Packagers: Plan Your Escape with Modernized Structures). Worth a read for PCB designers as well as IC packaging engineers.