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Re: [ide-dev] Experiment
Doug,

Comments below.

On 07.04.2016 18:30, Doug Schaefer wrote:
On Thu, Apr 7, 2016 at 12:23 PM, Ed Merks <ed.merks@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Doug,

Of course the IDE for C/C++ is no better:

  https://www.eclipse.org/downloads/packages/eclipse-ide-cc-developers/mars2

Of course. They're made with a cookie cutter.
No one wants to eat those cookies!
 


But I'll bet if package owners desired a better product-specific page, the foundation would be very happy to host it.  I know they're currently looking to revamp the whole end-to-end download experience, including the web aspects of that, so it's a perfect time to work together toward a great experience for Neon!

Again, it's not like we couldn't do this before. We're engineers. We need marketing people and web designers to make it really great.
The marketing people and web designers need engineers to put in the zing.
 

And I know there are projects with really nice websites:

  https://www.eclipse.org/Xtext/
  https://www.eclipse.org/xtend/

Those are by far the best of Eclipse and on par with commercial pages. Who built them?
It was built by engineers, using cookie cutters.  I know them personally.  They're very mulch-talented...
 


I like the CDT one as well:

  https://www.eclipse.org/cdt/

Something of this style would be much nicer for the C/C++ download page!

No, it still sucks.
But it sucks way less.
It's just a screen shot done on Linux which is only 25% of our user base.
The above were done on a Mac.  Which is also not the majority of our user base.
Better, yes, but I really hope we can do better than that.
I'm sure that as a group we could do even better.  We need a few key engineering messages, filtered by a marketing specialized, and polished by a web designer.

Personally I find that

  https://www.jetbrains.com/idea/

is not so ideal.  Even on my high resolution monitor the graphic takes up almost the whole screen with just a tiny fragment of the meat (captured on a Mac).  But then I'm an engineer, not a marketing specialist nor a web designer.

If I were feeling cranky, I would find major fault with this design. 

As a user, I have to look for, and notice, the little * to know that it's not just a Java IDE but also a Meta Programming System!

  https://www.jetbrains.com/mps/?fromMenu

Ooo, it does modeling?!

And I would wonder why

  https://kotlinlang.org/?fromMenu

looks so much different.  Did different web designer get their fingers onto that one?

All that being said, the overall impression is indeed pretty slick.
 

Regards,
Ed



Or does the foundation own/manage this page that
On 07.04.2016 18:05, Doug Schaefer wrote:
Ah, that was the other part of my story I edited out.

Yeah, you see the nice orange Downloads button and it takes you to our Downloads page. But I always like to get a bit of an overview on the thing I'm downloading before I do to make sure I'm not wasting my time and bandwidth.

So I click on the Eclipse for Java EE IDE link (I'm not doing EE but it's the first Java IDE I saw - true story, one of the young guys on our team just did that), and I get this:


Now compare that to the IntelliJ page: https://www.jetbrains.com/idea/

Some times I feel like when I do a Gerrit push on a neat new feature, that I'm pushing it into /dev/null. It's a fundamental flaw that's always been with Eclipse. It's not a product. I don't know why we expect it to be a product. You download it and use it, it feels like a product and maybe that's why it confuses people. But a product includes trying hard to get new customers and keep customers happy, great marketing and support. But in open source, that's not really a thing, because that costs money and the link between happy customers of an open source product to the members who pay for that is too long, only extreme visionaries and fans get it.

Anyway, again, I'm ranting. I need to get back to my CDT for Qt feature that I know my commercial customers will appreciate and hopefully open source ones do too, assuming they can find it, so we lose the sigma that you can't build Qt apps with Eclipse so that my commercial customers will feel it worth giving it a try and feel that I'm giving them value with our Eclipse based tools...

D


On Thu, Apr 7, 2016 at 11:50 AM, Mickael Istria <mistria@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Hi,

On the www.eclipse.org site, I see a big orange "Download" button on the top right, above the circles. I've seen some newcomers to Eclipse on that page, and they found the button.
Eclipse is more than the IDE, I find the welcome page describe well the various facets of Eclipse but still makes downloading the IDE pretty accessible.

However, I agree that the package-specific page is not very user-friendly. Maybe the download links should be moved or duplicated to the main area. https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=491263
--
Mickael Istria
Eclipse developer at JBoss, by Red Hat
My blog - My Tweets

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