Re: [platform-ui-dev] Activities and Contexts -(Commentary)

[David Corbin <dcorbin@xxxxxxxx>]

I have to agree that I too have a concern (I'm a developer of other plugins, 
but my concerns are as a user).  One of my biggest gripes (which I think 
someone else has mentioned, is the things that are missing from one 
perpsective or another (I know I can customize a lot of this).  But I find 
myself hopping back and forth between the Java and Debug perspectives way too 
much.  

Maybe contexts would *solve* my gripe, IF they can really tell what I'm doing 
has change, but if they don't ALWAYS get it right, I fear that it would 
become worse.

David


On Thursday 04 December 2003 12:26, Ed Burnette wrote:
> Hi folks, as a user of the software and as someone who tries to explain how
> to use it to other people from time to time, I'm having a really hard time
> following all this. Perspectives I could understand, but activities, roles,
> contexts, etc., I'm struggling with. Aren't you running the risk of making
> this way more complicated than it needs to be? And if it's too complicated,
> then a user will not be able to form a mind picture of how things are
> supposed to work. I like to use the example of a traffic light; drivers
> expect for lights to be green, then yellow, then red, then green again. If
> it goes from green straight to red, or if red and yellow are on at the same
> time, while that might be conveying something the traffic engineer thinks
> is important it would likely shock and confuse the driver because it's just
> not in their mind picture of how lights work. --Ed
>
> 	-----Original Message-----
> 	From: Chris McLaren [mailto:Chris_McLaren@xxxxxxxxxx]
> 	Sent: Thursday, December 04, 2003 11:44 AM
> 	To: platform-ui-dev@xxxxxxxxxxx
> 	Subject: Re: [platform-ui-dev] Activities and Contexts - Important Update
>
> 	> To avoid competing configuration stories in 3.0, you may want to
> 	> consider deprecating the portions of perspective functionality that
> 	> is now being done by contexts, or somehow link the two together (for
> 	> example a perspective could define a default set of contexts for
> 	> that perspective, and perspective extensions could add more contexts
> 	> as appropriate).
>
> 	I agree with you here. If perspective is layout + the functionality that
> contexts offer, perhaps severing them would be appropriate. I mentioned
> this overlap in my 'contexts' document of august 5, but its remained on the
> horizon since then.