Friday, November 11, 2011

Almost over the Jet Lag

I'd meant to post this somewhat earlier but between catching up on work and sleep this is the first chance I've had.

I was lucky enough to be able to go to EclipseCon Europe to give a presentation on the advantages of the Eclipse 4 API (as well as assisting Tom Schindl on his talk about 4.1 / 4.2). This is a great conference ! Kudos to Ralph and everybody involved for making this a wonderful experience.

First thing I did when I got back was to fix a couple of defects pointed out by folks while I was at ECE (see, I do listen...;-):

Bug 351230 - This one's for Ed. Here's the first part...tabs can now shrink to only showing 1 character as in 3.x. Be assured that the Tab ordering issue is under active...er...discussion...;-).

Kai, your CSS re-styling issue should be gone now as well...

Just finished doing my submissions for EclispeCon in Virginia, we've got cool coming !!

All in all it was an excellent trip. It was my first time to Europe and I'm definitely going back ! Great people and so much to see...

Finally,a side note just to keep things in perspective. While I was there my best friend and his wife had their first child...while I had a nice time it's got nothing on that ! He'll get my trip stories once he comes back down to earth...


Now I've gotta get back to it...do my expenses (and pay John for the 50 Euro I borrowed..;-)...

7 comments:

  1. Hi Eric,
    I was in your talk at EclipseCon Europe but didn't had time to talk with you directly, so here are few questions about 4.2.

    I'm just wondering what happened with quick assist in 4.x? The current text box is ugly and doesn't really fit to the main toolbar (see bug 362420 and 362421).

    It is planned to improve the default theme for 4.2 (see bug 362423)? Currently it looks so unprofessional that I can't believe that this will be default one.

    And finally - is there any API planned to replace the old "Presentations" API, which would allow 3rd partys contribute "Themes" for Eclipse 4.2? I mean not to replace the .css in my own RCP app, but to plug-in into the IDE and let user another choice in General->Apearance menu?

    regards,
    Andrey

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  2. Andrey, you might not find the default theme pleasant (and I find it too pale myself) but it was done by professional UI designers. So what you really mean is "I dislike the default theme" "I find it too pale" "I find the new active tab paradigm loses secondary information in non-active stacks" etc. I know the UI designers were professionals, gave this some thought, and had reasons for most of their changes. Please keep that in mind.

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  3. Paul,
    might be I'm overlooking something, but until now I assumed that the target audience of "standard" Eclipse IDE are NOT "grandma's with tablets" but programmers working with the "standard" PC's.

    Might be that the current 4.2 theme is well and professionally designed, but only considering the first target group. For the second one (and I'm part of this target group) the default theme in 4.2 is simply a failure.

    So therefore again the question - do we really target "grandma's with tablets" for 4.2 release, or should somebody consider needs from other 95% of Eclipse target audience?

    And yes, please, list here (or point me to) the reasons which the "professional UI designers" had in mind while designing the default 4.2 UI theme.

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  4. Andrey, I'm also in the 95% and I'm fine with it. You speak for yourself, not me, and not the community. Please remember that as well.

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  5. Discussions on mailing list about the theme, and bugs can be found at: http://dev.eclipse.org/mhonarc/lists/e4-dev/msg02068.html

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  6. Andrey, the main reason to have the search box visible is so that users know it exists. I've certainly seen experienced eclipse users be surprised when they see it for the first time.

    I can't really comment on the default theme too much, I'm certainly not a graphic designer (as you could tell if you could see what I'm wearing...;-). There is a 'Classic' theme which does a reasonable job of getting you back to the old look.

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  7. Oops, in my previous comment I meant that there are experienced eclipse users that didn't know that Ctrl-3 existed until someone showed it to them (like many of our 'magic' keybindings...

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