I like to pay attention to things that affect Eclipse, but outside the Eclipse community. In particular, I like reading Mary Beth Raven‘s design blog used to gather feedback about the design of the new version of Notes (that is based on Eclipse). It seems there is an interesting conundrum regarding how plug-ins should be perceived by “Samantha” (design persona for joe user). Most of us in the Eclipse community are developers and are used to the concept of plug-ins, but now it seems like the notion of plug-ins will be available to a whole new set of users. Do normal users understand plug-ins? Should they be renamed to something else? I think this is a fairly interesting discussion so I linked Mary Beth’s blog if people want to comment.
Posts Tagged with “eclipse”
Sneak Peak of PDE 3.3M5
By Chris Aniszczyk
The PDE team has been spending a lot of late nights the past few days working on getting everything ready for 3.3M5. Here’s a sneak peak of just some of the things coming in by the end of this week 🙂
Bringing Sexy Back to PDE Form Validation
Mike Pawlowski has done a fantastic job in improving the PDE editors in 3.3M5; this is only a snapshot of what he has done 🙂
Update Site Target Provisioner
I have spent the past few days working on an update site provisioner for PDE. What this basically means is that you can goto your Target Platform preference page and add plug-ins to your target platform by pointing to update sites 🙂 This is all part of PDE’s provisioning story, and if you think about it, there is the possibility of adding target provisioner’s that can work with OSGi’s OBR or maybe those crazy Maven heathens can figure out how to integrate a target provisioner for a Maven-based environment.
This is only a small sneak peak of what the PDE team has accomplished for 3.3M5, so please pay attention to the New & Noteworthy for everything 🙂
Article: Building Templates with PDE
By Chris Aniszczyk
Ever wanted to know where those fancy templates come from in PDE? Well, I have a new article that goes over some of the facilities PDE provides to hook in your own templates. It’s my hope that people create more templates for their projects as one of the things that I found that helped me greatly learning about Eclipse was the templates. How cool was it to generate a RCP mail application in a few seconds!?
Vive le Forms!
By Chris Aniszczyk
The 3.3M5 release of Eclipse is looking exciting (hopefully Ed Merks will not cause an M5a release), especially with the new changes surrounding Forms. Just giving people some heads up here and hopefully this will increase the adoption of Forms in the future.
Ctrl+AWESOME
By Chris Aniszczyk
Maybe I’m late to the game on this one, but I have discovered the greatest Eclipse thing since Ctrl+Shift+T, apparently, if you do a Ctrl+E (thanks Boris), you get a pop-up with just about everything you care about. It’s hard to explain, just do it 🙂
What’s in a name?
By Chris Aniszczyk
While looking at the last meeting minutes from the Eclipse Planning Council, I came across an interesting entry:
Future Simultaneous Releases
We chose “Ganymede” for the 2008 release and “Io” for the 2009 release.
*blinks*
I thought part of the fun was allowing the Eclipse community to choose a name they would like (as long as its appropriate, otherwise you can come up with stupid names like Warty Warthog ;p)
Do people like Ganymede or Io? I understand we have the Jupiter moon theme going here at Eclipse, but you know, there are other cool Jupiter moons like Elara or S/2003 J12 that need some love too.
JRE Export, Extreme Makeover Edition
By Chris Aniszczyk
I revisited the JRE export feature after getting some good feedback from people and a bug report (that’s how open-source works, right? ;p). In the next I-build, the product editor will be enhanced to include a new section for JRE bundling in the Launching tab (Note, the margins are a bit off now, but you get the idea ;o).
Tagging in Eclipse
By Chris Aniszczyk
At Lotusphere I ran into Li-Te Cheng who gave me a cool demo of some tagging abilities in Eclipse out there. There are currently two projects out there it seems that deal with tagging in Eclipse: Eclipse Resource Tagger and TagSEA.
TagSEA is more advanced in my opinion, but after thinking a bit about this topic, wouldn’t it be cool to tag things in your code and be able to share them with co-workers (or other people)? I could imagine tagging common code (maybe like saving an EMF resource) so it could easily be found again by anyone. This begs the questions whether those crazy Mylar guys would be interested in this type of functionality.
In the end, I think a del.icio.us type thing for Eclipse or source code would benefit the community.
Nominate Something for the Eclipse Technology Awards
By Chris Aniszczyk
I was looking over the current nominations for Eclipse Technology Awards and the list is a bit thin 🙂 How about everyone pick one of their favorite applications and get in touch with the author(s) and tell them to nominate their application? I personally have contacted the authors of jUploader and uDig which are two applications I especially enjoyed using. What are your favorite applications that you would like to nominate?