Re: [mylar-dev] dev build for 3.3M7

[Mik Kersten <beatmik@xxxxxxx>]

Eugene Kuleshov wrote:
...
>  Also note that average user won't complain about some feature he
> is not aware of. No offense but it is purely lack of imagination.

All: please note that this tone of communication goes completely against 
the mantra of our project and is not reflective of how other committers 
think of the user community.  For a long time our communication 
philosophy has been stated as:

"Our philosophy is that the user is always right, even if it takes time 
to figure out how or why they are right. Our project thrives on the 
feedback of users, whether they are seasoned experts or newbies. 
Feedback defines how the tool should work, how it should be simplified, 
and how it should evolve."
http://wiki.eclipse.org/index.php/Mylar_Contributor_Reference#Communication

I never cease to be amazed at the quality of the feedback of both 
newcommers and seasoned users to suggest features, new ideas, and 
variations on the existing UI.  One of the most rewarding parts of my 
job as the lead of this project is that I read every comment on every 
bug report, which has given me a tremendous appreciation for the 
imagination and wealth of ideas and contributions that have come from 
our still rapidly growing user community.  And as a project we are going 
to continue striving to make it easier and easier for new users to 
provide feedback by continuing to facilitate bug reporting and improving 
the usage reporting mechanisms that we added for 2.0M3.

-------------

Eugene, in saying "no offense" you probably realize that I find this 
statement extremely offensive to our user community and know that it 
drives me crazy to see this, so *please* read the communication 
guidelines again.  The main problem with this is that it creates a bad 
dynamic that makes other people shy to post for fear of being flamed at, 
and what we want is everyone to post their ideas and opinions freely.

As usual you have some good technical points interspersed with the 
flaming, so I'll answer those.  But I'm done with the flaming and do not 
plan to reply further posts from you on this thread.

>  SDK have feature to use background-based highliting for CVS stuff. So, 
> bad excuse you have. :-P

This is not enabled by default and I am arguing that it is a bad idea to 
have something like this enabled by default for views that have 
sufficiently high fidelity decorators and are frequently visible.  Part 
of this argument comes from experience, since I have worked for weeks 
with a Package Explorer that had foreground highlighting.

>  It depends. Monotonous views are hard to deal with and hard to pickup
> tasks from list of >10 if those tasks have orthogonal characteristics to
> any sorting or grouping mechanisms provided by Task List view. That is
> why I and few other users found highlighters quite handy to make those
> tasks more noticeable.

Yes, highlighters are great at making these orthogonal properties that 
don't participate in sorting and grouping jump out immediately.  But 
they are extremely expensive visually because they drown out the other 
visual annotations that we use to indicate these properties.  For 
example, we can now instantly pick out which bugs are marked major. 
with the icon overlays, or which ones are overdue.  In my usage 
experience that gets drowned out in the presence of highlighter.

>  Well, it seems like you have short memory. I will refer you to the 
> archive of the mylar-dev list and the newsgroup. Look for complaints 
> about disappeared highlighters.

The only statement I know of on record about a user other than you 
needing highlighters boiled down to problems with other parts of the pre 
1.0 UI.  The user's statement (Oct 18, 2006 newsgroup post) was:

"My current use of Highlighters will probably seem more like a 
workaround to you.  I'm basically using them as you describe the use of 
the scheduling in your recent article.  I started doing that before I 
realized that scheduling could work that way.  Unfortunately, I find 
that the scheduling coloring / workweek filter doesn't really work well 
for me due to issues with the workweek filter view and how the coloring 
is applied."

This and other points they brought up have either now been addressed or 
will be addressed via other improvements.  So I am again left to 
conclude that you are projecting your opinions and needs onto those of 
others.  That's *not* to say that we will never have a reason to add 
highlighters, just that the current state is that we don't have one.

The Mylar UI will never be optimized for you and me.  It needs to be 
optimized for intermediates (one of Alan Cooper's axioms that I deeply 
believe in).  I have always taken every one of your suggestions to 
heart.  But if you project something that you are convinced of to be 
something that others need you make it harder for me to do so.

Mik

--
Mik Kersten
President & CTO, http://tasktop.com
Project Lead, http://eclipse.org/mylar