Community
Participate
Working Groups
I think I've had at least three people talk to me on IRC, confused over how they can connect to IRC with ECF. Apparently, the little man icon just don't seem to catch people's eyes for some reason. Somewhere in our release notes, we need the awe-inspiring red rectangle, to capture the masses' attention. <nitind> I hear red rounded corner rectangles are all the rage...: http://www.eclipse.org/webtools/community/tutorials/XMLValidation/images/project-properties.png We may also want to redesign this whole deal so that the little man appears in other places. Or at least, provide IPCA connections through the MRV as you would kinda expect it to be there.
I'm one of the three that asked on IRC. For some reason I never, ever use the toolbar... Keyboard shortcuts are so much easier. The biggest problem is that all of the ECF windows come up totally blank and unhelpful. You could put a hint in them to help get the user started. The conversation: (15:39:07) sabron: rcjsuen: an easy fix would be to display a small phrase the rest of the blank windows like the Collaboration view currently does. (15:39:28) rcjsuen: sabron: yes, that's a good idea (15:39:29) rcjsuen: just some kinda (15:39:32) rcjsuen: Click here to connect (15:39:34) rcjsuen: with a Link widget (15:39:49) sabron: Yeah. I would definitely have found that.
(In reply to comment #0) > I think I've had at least three people talk to me on IRC, confused over how > they can connect to IRC with ECF. Apparently, the little man icon just don't > seem to catch people's eyes for some reason. > > Somewhere in our release notes, we need the awe-inspiring red rectangle, to > capture the masses' attention. > > <nitind> I hear red rounded corner rectangles are all the rage...: > http://www.eclipse.org/webtools/community/tutorials/XMLValidation/images/project-properties.png > > We may also want to redesign this whole deal so that the little man appears in > other places. Or at least, provide IPCA connections through the MRV as you > would kinda expect it to be there. > Might want to point out that the ECF help overview has exactly the little red circle on the little guy. Maybe we should animate him jumping up and down? :). Oh wait, we have comply with the Eclipse UI guidelines...darn :). This overview page uses a graphic in the org.eclipse.ecf.docs/html/overview/images/commperspective.png that is used in the overview...this could potentially be added to the home page and/or wiki. I can't do it myself right now as I'm preparing to leave town (now that my crime is complete :)
I was actually going to file an enhancement in this area today. What I think needs to happen is when a user switches to the communications perspective, the contacts view should be put in a way that it's in the left area. Within the contacts view, if there are no connections, we display a message with a hyperlink to get people started. Other than that, I'm not sure how much more we can combat this problem :/
Here is the solution that I envision: Many windows in eclipse have a toolbar in the window. I believe in the "contacts" window there should be a toolbar with connect / disconnect buttons. When I look at other Chat applications, they usually have - a dropdownbox, with the options "available, busy/away, disconnect" - a button with somekind of plus + symbol, to add a new connection. I think a mini toolbar like this would fit nicely into the "contact" window.
Scott makes a good point in comment 1, after all that's what the Synchronize view does.
Let's get something simple to address this quickly (for 1.0.1).
I added a popup dialog now by default if you click the select provider icon in the toolbar. The next step is to update the contacts view to show some information when we aren't connected to anything.
changing target milestone, and keywords. Perhaps this would be a good bugday bug?
Any chance of getting this bug addressed with a message in the empty contacts view this week (i.e. before ECF 1.2)?
I mostly won't have time for this as I leave on vacation this Thursday.
Resetting target milestone to 2.0.0M4. No other resources to address for ECF 1.2.
Chris please reassign if you don't think you can get to additions by M7 target milestone.
I'd like to work on this bug this weekend.
Reassigning to Abner. Thanks much in advance!
Created attachment 96730 [details] Patch Adding a help message when contacts view is empty.
Created attachment 96731 [details] mylyn/context/zip
Looks good. Applied patch #96730 and committed to HEAD. Updated IP log. Thanks very much for your contribution Abner. Would you like to consider becoming an ECF committer? Resolving this as fixed as main changes to communications perspective and message in unconnected contacts view have now been added.
(In reply to comment #17) > Looks good. Applied patch #96730 and committed to HEAD. Updated IP log. > Thanks very much for your contribution Abner. Would you like to consider > becoming an ECF committer? Yes, I would like to :D
closing.
