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Re: [ecf-dev] debug popup window in XMPP

Hi Remy,

I've seen some reports of the 'Universal/Generic Notification API' (with platform-specific notification visualization) flying around, and that does sound very promising indeed. According to the bug trail, there wasn't any plan to include this in 3.5 Galileo; if it is in the 3.6 Helios plan, that might be a thing to consider for ECF in the release train, as well.

I would even go that far to suggest to remove the Communications Perspective completely. Of course, my interpretation of the Eclipse IDE's semantics is a personal one, but I struggle to see why I would need to switch to a specific perspective to enjoy collaboration features, while I'm programming in Java, or C++ for that matter. Unless there is a work flow associated around a ECF-specific tool set, which would warrant a particular set-up of views and other UI components, it feels like an oddball perspective, merely serving as a showcase of the bag of (fun) features ECF provides.

With 'historical' and 'upside down' I merely wanted to state that a lot of ECF UI code is indeed the result of the natural evolution of the project. Although ECF has introduced a number of fascinating concepts around collaboration and interaction, the UI-aspect of that still needs some polishing, when considering usability.

For now, I still use a separate Jabber client, running side-by-side with my Eclipse IDE. If you consider Spark IM Client, by Ignite Realtime, that means running two VMs on your machine. I'd look forward to (help or) see that change in the future!

Best regards,
 Dann

Remy Suen wrote:

On Fri, Jul 31, 2009 at 3:48 AM, Dann Martens<dann@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> IMHO, the Communications Perspective is at odds with what I expect
> from any other Eclipse Perspective, in the sense that perspectives
> have a 'vertical' aspect to them and communication itself a
> 'horizontal' aspect.


I think I understand what you're getting at here (though I could be completely off). I think the 'Communications' perspective is somewhat modeled after the 'Resource' perspective (though I don't know anyone that uses the OOTB 'Resource' perspective).

> I would expect communications to be cross-
> cutting, available in any perspective, as an added feature. Its
> quite tedious to have to set up a connection, by having to switch to
> a perspective, first.


I can't find the exact reference at the moment but I believe there are guidelines that indicate that a project is not supposed to "taint" other perspectives by "randomly" contributing toolbar items. You should be able to customize your perspective (under the 'Window' menu or the 'Eclipse' menu on the Mac) to add those connection toolbar items to your perspective as you wish.

http://aniszczyk.org/2007/10/12/stalked-by-a-button/
http://wassim-melhem.blogspot.com/2008/08/crime-and-punishment.html

I agree that I should be able to connect from any perspective, though I'm not sure who actually gets to make that decision.

> I've been re-evaluating some of these issues with Galileo, and there
> is a check-box 'Display ECF collaboration outside of the workbench'
> which shows a modest Toaster Pop-up.
> In terms of UX, a docked view appearing out of the blue prompted by
> an incoming message feels like it violates a number of UI
> principles, including Eclipse best-practices. That still happens
> with the 'outside' option enabled. At best, that could be a very
> specialized good-will option for those with a very specific use case.
>
> It feels as if the UX priorities are upside-down in ECF at the
> moment. That's probably a historical thing, but I hope these issues
> can be addressed in the future.


I'm not sure I know what you're talking about though there's plenty of UI code that has gone untouched since even before the 1.0 release.

> If you compare this to Mylyn approach: they have a great
> implementation of Toaster Pop-ups to deal with this kind of
> asynchronous communication. Overall, Mylyn does behave more
> 'horizontal', as I would expect.


You may be interested in:
https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=229823
https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=209911

Regards,
Remy


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