Schematic Enhancements (New Feature Summary)

Altium Designer 16.1 brings some small, yet beneficial improvements to the Schematic Editor, including additional scoping for the Find Similar Objects feature, and the inclusion of bus entry objects when highlighting buses or associated nets using the Net Color Override feature. While small on their own, they collectively enhance your Schematic Capture experience, and aid in delivering greater productivity and efficiency.

Additional Scoping for FSO

Previous versions of the software allowed you to find similar objects using a scope of either the Current Document, or all Open Documents. With Altium Designer 16.1, the Find Similar Objects dialog now has a third scoping alternative - Project Documents. This allows you to more logically find similar objects within the bounds of the active design project, since it is not typically the case that you would want to make changes to target objects across multiple design projects at once.

Find similar objects within the active design project only, using the new
Project Documents scoping.

Inclusion of Bus Entries when Highlighting Buses

While you could quite happily use the Net Color Override feature in Altium Designer 16.0 to highlight Buses, one entity was left out of the party - the humble Bus Entry. In Altium Designer 16.1, this omission has been rectified, with this object type once more reunited with the bus to which it is associated, and together painted by the net override color of your choice.

Bus Entries are now included when using the Net Color Override feature to highlight a bus (or a net that includes a bus).

Clearer Indication of Locked Designators in the Annotate Dialog

A very minor improvement, but an improvement all the same, is the addition of padlock icons () at the top of the columns in the Annotate dialog, that are used to prevent designator and sub-part changes respectively. This makes it clear, at-a-glance, what the purpose of each column actually is.

A couple of padlock icons go a long way to visually reaffirming the purpose of dialog controls to prevent the update of a component designator, or a sub-part of a multi-part component.