Chris Aniszczyk's (zx) diatribe

If you have been paying attention to some of the latest builds in Eclipse, you might have noticed a new User Assistance folder in the File->New wizard. There is now a graphical way to modify cheatsheets in Eclipse (Thank you Mike!). It actually makes the creation and modification of cheatsheets really easy (and less error prone!). From one editor you can quickly create steps, browse commands and link to help items (there’s also a way to preview!!!). Give it a try when M3 comes out!

I’m sure this will spur the adoption of cheatsheets so we should see more of them, right :)?

The COmmunity Systems Management Open Source (COSMOS) was proposed recently with a really large goal in mind, uniting a lot of the systems management stuff out there (There are some big names behind this too, IBM, Cisco, Intel, Compuware, etc…). A lot of this seems to fall in line with what IBM has with its Tivoli branch and around the area of ITSM. It’s encouraging to see this type of software head in this direction, but I have my doubts until I see something real… I’ve worked with systems management stuff in the past and I got know my friend Dante and one of his circle’s of hell really well.

I’m still stuck with Blogger (Beta) so sorry for the cut off posts (The blog applications out there suck, the support for migration between services is awful). I will migrate to WordPress once WordPress supports importing from a Blogger Beta blog. On a side note, I updated my blogger picture because certain people said I looked like an alien.

A few months ago I wrote an introductory article on GMF that was finally posted today on developerWorks. I tried to model it after my old ‘Using GEF with EMF’ article. The article doesn’t really do justice to how powerful GMF can be, but I hope it convinces people to give GMF a try at least. Oh how things have changed in the past couple of years in regards to open-source modeling tools.

Being at EclipseWorld this week, I came across a new edition of the EclipseReview magazine. It features an article on eRCP which I co-wrote 🙂 Please give it a look as eRCP just hit its 1.0 M2 release yesterday (which means eRCP is getting closer to 1.0)

Doing my daily newsgroup parsing, I came across a request from the Eclipse Modeling project… they need a new logo… their current one has caused me temporary blindness (however, I do appreciate the direction they were headed). Please see this bug if you want to contribute!

Ok, I hate the new Blogger. I have to cut my feed to ‘short’ now as they fix a bug. Here’s my last post before things went crazy:
I have noticed that Eclipse has a new User Interface Architecture Group responsible for all things usability. Well, on a recent plane ride leaving NYC, I tried to hack up some new icons (to no avail, my InkScape skills were lacking) for ECF as the current ones cause my eyes to bleed.

So, what are people’s thoughts about creating some type of project in Eclipse focused on providing icons and usability advice in general? Other Eclipse projects would be able to file bugs against this project by attatching screenshots, or requests for icons. I feel that if we had a project like this, Eclipse (and its subprojects) could benefit from a more consistent user experience. Furthermore, I feel that the process of how icons are created isn’t really transparent at all.

Who knows where that little plugin icon came from PDE 🙁

Looks like Eclipse 3.3 M1 is out the door. As evident from the new and noteworthy, SWT/PDE/UA/Debug/Text/JDT were the teams not on vacation 😉

Without the 3.3 plan, the PDE team blindly decided to go with the theme of sexiness for 3.3 M1 (Debug team went for axesomeness apparently), we hope you like it 😉

Not sure how many follow the Tuscany project, but there has been some work recently to get Tuscany on top of Equinox. Looks like more people are adopting OSGi in their respective environments 😉

I have a writing problem. I also had an intern problem this summer. I had a few interns working on some JET-related technology so we decided to give back to the community a bit by writing an article about the new technology. Before anyone asks, this article is about the EMFT JET (formerly known as JET2), not the JET included in EMF that so few of us know about (and love!). I would also like to thank Paul Elder for his valuable feedback on the article.

JET is quite powerful. Powerful enough that we may want to think about this old plan item again (however, I understand that there is a dependency on EMF so using JET in the platform won’t happen, however, what’s wrong with some healthy debate again?).

It seems after some dancing with legal, eRCP finally has a QTe implementation available. Once I track down a QTe-enabled device, I’ll post some screenshots with a simple application. I’ll also try to have something ready for EclipseWorld to demo.

In my opinion, it’s exciting to see Eclipse being pushed towards the embedded space more and more (it’s also nice to hear that Wind River is donating a ton of code). On a side note, I’m off to New York City tomorrow which apparently is hotter than Austin, TX at the moment 🙁