Description nicola guidotto 2005-09-04 13:26:03 EDT

As an IT Professional, I work with my notebook a lot of time; often I need to
adapt my e-desktop with the HW resources I find.
At home I always attach an extenal LCD extending the winXP desktop.
At my home place, I have cloned some eclipse 3.1 perspectives, making some view
floating and adjusting in the second display.
The improvement is sensitive because with this extra area I have more
information in front of me, very very comfortable.
When I travel to some customer, where no aditional display are available, I use
the "default single display" perspective with the view tabbed.

This eclipse workbench usage is very impressive IMHO; the tool is really build
for work! Sure!!!

But I have percept one disavantage for the notebook users in the use case exposed.

The flexible configuration is here, an it work very well, but some automatism
does not feel the notebook, and the place where the notebook are, when they
perform their tasks.

For example, consider the automatic debug perspective switch, from the java
perspective, it's cool, but I my case I have now 2 java and 2 debug perspective,
1 pair per single display usage, and the other pair for dual display extended
desktop.

I thinking someting like a profile manager, with a simple combobox on the status
bar with the configured profiles name list. The "java->debug auto switch" could
be named as a kind of workbench "workflow rule", and a collection of rules for
other perspectives (of other installed tools), become a use case or a profile,
and so, a name in the lower combobox.

If that's all, when I work at home I simply select the "at home" profile, but to
 the customers I simply select "to the customer xxx".

What do you think?

Thanks in advance.