One of CircuitLab’s guiding design principles is to “make the easy things easy, and the hard things possible.” Today we are rolling out a feature that makes diagramming your circuits in CircuitLab much more intuitive and user-friendly. Known informally within our team as “Smart Wires”, the feature is a series of heuristics that auto-select wires, move components, and create new wires in an attempt to anticipate a user's intention. It also makes improvements to the way new wires are created and edited.
When developing new features, we take care to keep ultimate control of the design with the user. These are your designs, and we’re just here to make it easier for you meet your technical goals. In keeping with this idea, “smart” wires stretch at the right places when the component it’s attached to is dragged and certain “smart” components know to move together as a group. But we have taken care to do this only when it makes sense, and never at the expense of less user control. If CircuitLab’s new Smart Wires feature isn’t doing what you expected, simply press ALT to cancel the auto-selection and proceed as normal.
“Smart Wires” are currently available to all of our CircuitLab premium subscribers, who will have a chance to preview the feature and offer suggestions for tweaks and fixes. We’ll also be offering a limited trial to all of our users. Upgrade Today to get unlimited access!
Until next time,
The CircuitLab Team
CircuitLab demo and interview by Alix Paultre for Power Systems Design:
(from A look at the Circuitlab cloud-based schematic capture and design tool (Video))
The CircuitLab team will be at Design West for the next three days at the McEnery Convention Center in San Jose.
Passes to the expo floor are free, so come down if you are in the area. If you are there, please let us know in the comments so we have a chance to say hi!
CircuitLab is an in-browser schematic capture and circuit simulation software tool to help you rapidly design and analyze analog and digital electronics systems.