Just another reminder for people that EclipseCon submissions close today! Please submit something while you still can!
In 3.4M4, it looks like Eclipse will get an updated splash screen:
Kind of cool, eh?
Now someone needs to recreate one of those wallpapers we used for Europa for Ganymede.
EclipseCon 2008 is closing submissions on Monday, November 19th so there’s not much time left to submit something. The PDE team has submitted its annual plug-in development tutorials:
Being on the EclipseCon Program Committee, I’m going to do my best to try something new this year with the tutorial order. I’m thinking that the introductory Plug-in Development tutorials done by the PDE team should take place in the morning. In the afternoon, there will be a tutorial on eRCP followed by one on RAP. This effectively would allow a tutorial attendee to get a taste of three different runtime environments that Eclipse targets:
Where else can you do that? This also traces the evolution of Eclipse from just being some tooling platform to a viable runtime for various types of applications. It’s my hope that the tutorial attendees who went through this track of tutorials would come away that Eclipse isn’t just about tools anymore and that there’s a lot of power in reusing your skills and assets to develop against three different runtime environments. All of this in just one day!
Do people think this is a good idea? If so, I’ll see what I can do to make it happen.
Oh, and please submit something to EclipseCon if you haven’t already 🙂
The Eclipse Foundation staff recently added latitude and longitude fields to the Eclipse Portal.
If you’re a committer, please log in to the portal and set those fields. If you don’t know your coordinates, get them from MultiMap.
My dream of having a world wide map of Eclipse committers is one step closer. It will be interesting to see how globally diverse we are using a visual aid.
Our map will need to be sexier than the Gnome map though.
Do you like those little notification pop-ups that Mylyn and RSSOwl do? Do you like Pop-up Video?
If so, please voice your support on this enhancement request against the Eclipse Workbench to include support for a standard desktop notification pop-up.
I think this is a great idea as I’ve seen a lot of questions on how to do those “Mylyn pop-ups.” Plus, the ability to notify users in a fairly discrete manner is nice.
Brian Bauman and I from PDE will be giving a webinar in late January so please mark your calendars!
I really wanted to name the talk ‘Plug-in Development 1.0.1.qualifier‘ but I don’t think the target audience would get it…
For the webinar, Brian and I want to keep everyone happy so we are splitting the webinar into three parts. For the first part, we will spend some time covering the basics of using PDE for plug-in development. The second part will include some advance aspects of PDE… things like the Target Editor… Automated Management of Dependencies… etc…. For the finale, we will include some best practices, tips and tricks that we have learned through the years of developing plug-ins. We will then open the floor for questions.
So, please tune in in late January!
Can you see what’s wrong with this picture? Most people can’t. Only a few people like Kevin McGuire who like to nitpick and subscribe to the religion of color can spot the problem quickly. I call these people pixel pushers. In my opinion, these are the people that make Eclipse look good due to their attention to detail.
Now getting back to what’s wrong, here’s a hint:
Oh my eyes! When I saw this it hit me like a ton of bricks and I had to fix it immediately.
Why does this happen? Well, there’s the unfortunate situation when Eclipse Forms sections are given text clients with things like toolbar managers to add cool icons. This results in text clients taller than their title text so things grow accordingly causing adjacent sections to possibly not align. If you would like to learn more about this problem, check out this unpublished article on some new things in Eclipse Forms 3.3 by one of my favorite people in Toronto, Adam Archer.
Here’s how it should look like:
Ah, much better!
What’s the fix? Align adjacent sections using the text client height difference:
section2.descriptionVerticalSpacing = section1.getTextClientHeightDifference();
Does this make me a pixel pusher too?
The Eclipse User Assistance (UA) team is looking for suggestions on how to improve the Welcome experience for the 3.4 version of Eclipse. I opened a bug to help facilitate the discussion.
If you ever had a problem with the Welcome experience within Eclipse, here’s your chance to be heard and have your thoughts considered for the 3.4 release.
I was doing my daily reading of news and came across this article over at News.com. It seems Adobe is getting ready to overhaul its Photoshop product… here’s a cute quote:
In comparison, Photoshop today is unwelcoming and unhelpful. “Today, if a user walks up to Photoshop and says, ‘What do I do?’ the app kind of shrugs, stubs out a cigarette, and says, ‘I dunno–you tell me.’ That’s not real cool, and we can do better,” Nack said.
Sounds like my first experience with Eclipse 2.0 🙂
Here’s another quote:
“A new user interface will help Photoshop become “everything you need, nothing you don’t,” said Photoshop product manager John Nack…
…
Adobe coders have been working to make Photoshop to enable the modular, adaptable vision with features such as customizable menus and shortcuts, or workspaces that let users save particular configurations of editing palettes.
…
We’re already making the code modular so that people aren’t running what they don’t need,” Nack said. “Now we need to follow up at the user experience level, so that people don’t have to wade through anything not geared towards the task at hand.”
Eclipse could help in some of these areas as these were similar problems software developers faced within integrated development environments. For example, the notion of Eclipse perspectives was introduced to help codify the UI for the task you’re currently working on, whether it is Java development, planning or debugging. So…
Perspectives… check.
Modular architecture… check.
Configurable keybindings… check.
Workspaces… check.
Adobe already plugs into Eclipse for AIR-related tooling. How about plugging Photoshop onto Eclipse?
I guess I’m getting spoiled these days with everything integrated within Eclipse… I almost feel like an Emacs developer back in the 90’s with NNTP, IRC and email in my Emacs client.
It looks like a blogger has some kind words about PDT and WTP:
It was very easy to get started using. I skipped the tutorials and dived in and created a project. I’ve been using it for a week, and it’s already made a significant difference. For one thing, I have easy access to the functions and classes of PHP 5 with references as to input parameters and return types. Also it does syntax checking automatically, so it’s very easy to track typos and such.
There’s a lot of depth in Eclipse, and I’m just learning the tool. But I am already impressed that it has made me more productive. Using an IDE for development just makes a lot more sense. It feels like a real coding tool, and it is.
So I’ve already said goodbye to Dreamweaver and shifted my development work into Eclipse. It’s open source so it’s free software. The Eclipse Foundation manages the community that develops it.
It’s worked well for me at work, but I’ve used it now at home to modernize Manufactured Environments’ templates into the new module structure available in Movable Type 4.0. Eclipse feels like a good match for the type of tasks I’m using it for – PHP development, XML and XSLT development, and general web work.
Sometimes it’s very nice to hear kind words in a sea of critics.
In the words of Scott Adams, “Remember there’s no such thing as a small act of kindness. Every act creates a ripple with no logical end.”
Pulse launched today. What is Pulse? Well, it’s quite a few things but let me tell you a story about it in pictures.
I’ve been toying with Pulse the past few days as the Genuitec folks were kind enough to invite me to test it. I managed to setup a few ‘profiles’ with it. Think of profiles as an easy to configure set of plug-ins (or more appropriately bits of functionality). I have two profiles:
I launched my C/C++ profile but found that it lacked Mylyn so I was naturally devastated. Instead of going the classic update manager route… I launched the Pulse Explorer to see what’s going on:
Yap, looks like no Mylyn in my C/C++ profile. Let’s see if I can find Mylyn in the software catalog:
Sweet, I found Mylyn, let’s add it to my C/C++ profile:
Now let’s run the C/C++ profile:
Bingo, I have my C/C++ tools along with Mylyn:
That’s Pulse in pictures for you. I see a lot of potential in Pulse as revolutionizing the way the Eclipse community manages their plug-in install base.
However, I have some worries. Pulse seems to be backed by only one company currently and to appeal to the greater community, they may have to open up more. What do I mean by this? Well, it seems that in order to add software to the catalog, you have to go through an autocratic process. I understand that the process may help ensure only quality items end up in the catalog, but opening it up to everyone similar to the Netbeans Plug-in Portal is a step in the right direction.
Other than that, hats off to the guys behind Pulse for putting together an excellent tool and service.