RE: [platform-ui-dev] Activities and Contexts - Important Update

["Jonathan Gossage" <jgossage@xxxxxxxx>]

Here is another user perspective on this work.

I am personally quite uncomfortable with the interfaces that I have seen to
date that try to dynamically determine what tools should be available at a
particular time or that try to guess what context you are really operating
in. The example quoted in this discussion about switching between the Debug
and Java perspective are illuminating. Here, a user is carrying out a debug
and repair activity with many switches between the tool sets in use. The
activity does not reach closure in the user's mind until the problem has
been solved. The problem with systems that try to be too adaptive is that
they, in general, are not able to understand when a particular user is ready
to switch from one micro-context to another. This is one reason why the
current perspective switching which is user driven works so well, The user
is in control at all times.

I believe that a lot more research is needed in this area before adaptive
tools can become really useful in a large community. I believe that this
work might be best carried out in the context of an Eclipse technology
project. For example, one approach that could be examined is the following.

1. Provide a observational tool that would passively observe and log the
sequence of tool use by a user.
2. Provide an analytical tool that can look for common usage patterns in the
observed behaviour.
3. Provide tools that could allow the user to define and follow
micro-workflows that are not currently allowed by Eclipse without the need
to write new plugins. Obviously, scripting is one possibility here but I am
sure there are others.

Another angle of attack could be to build experimental adaptive systems as
plugins and put them into the community for evaluation without committing
the core Eclipse platform to one particular approach. I just do not think
that we, as yet, have a sufficient understanding of the psychology of
software development to be able to produce generally acceptable adaptive
interfaces.