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Re: [cross-project-issues-dev] Eierlegende Wollmilchsau

Doug,

Comments below.

On 09/12/2015 4:58 PM, Doug Schaefer wrote:
Thanks Ed! (and Michael for the picture).
It was kind of entertaining.  In any case, we generate this product along with the rest of the product catalog, so it will always be available for testing.
This is awesome and I’m glad we’re finally talking about this. In fact, I think we also need to go beyond the contents of the simrel repo and also consider popular 3rd party plug-ins, Pydev and Nodeclipse come to mind. And Andmore which is coming in Neon will also make this much worse and I’m planning on helping clean that up.
Yes, unfortunately once it's installed, it's just all "Eclipse" to the end user, so if others mess things up, they mess it up for all of us...

You bring up a great point about the Toolbar. It’s the most obvious affect of the tragedy of the commons, and it’s why I’m having a personal war against it. Do these buttons really need to be in the face of the user all the time?
I would say not, and certainly not in every perspective either.
How often are any of these actually used versus the real estate they take up.
Indeed.
Wouldn’t it look better if we had fewer toolbar buttons but make them a little bit larger to make them easier to understand for new users?
I actually like them small.  But there's no accounting for personal taste.   Of course there could be a preference for toolbar button size (like Windows has for the task icons, which I have set to small), but unless an army of graphic designers make nicer large icons, that will probably look crappy.
How do we make this better?
Get everyone to agree on the one way that's best. :-P   With EMF I took pains to ensure that it has no visible footprint when installed.   For Oomph we also tried to minimize visual footprint, so the toolbar buttons we really like (and that are super handy, if you're actually using Oomph) are not visible by default, but are easily made visible via a preference (and of course that preference can be recorded so I always see it and  you never do). 

While on the topic, one of the horrible things I always hit is those navigator toolbar buttons that I use a lot, but it navigates to a different editor, which has different toolbar contributions, so the navigator buttons move, and I have to hunt it down again, or hit the wrong button.  It's super frustrating.

And yes, the Launch Bar. Lots of Eclipse veterans complain about how it doesn’t fit in with the rest of the toolbar.
It definitely doesn't fit in.  But I understand the design intent is good.
But take a look at the New Connection… item and how it really doesn’t fit in the 16 pixel height. It looks horrible.
Where does it come from? My IDEs never have that, but of course I mostly use the committers package with some modeling tools installed.  But I didn't see it in JEE either.
When you turn off most of the toolbar buttons like I always do in my workspaces, the Launch Bar looks kinda nice and it’s really easy to swap launch configurations, modes and targets and hit the start button to kick off a launch. Now, clearly as this picture shows, it sticks out a bit too much. But I’ve always said I am open to find a solution that makes everything look better.
One of the fundamental issues is whether I need all these toolbars in all perspectives.   It would be nice if you could create a cool CDT perspective without all the other things you don't need/want showing up.

Easier customization would help, but it would be annoying to have to repeat those customizations for each workspace each time...

Doug




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