| [platform-ui-dev] GUI Bloopers in Eclipse |
To all Eclipse developers doing UI work, Last week at OTI Ottawa, during an informal weekly lunchtime discussion group we have about code quality, I gave a presentation on Jeff Johnson's book "GUI Bloopers" (http://www.gui-bloopers.com). I had previously gone through the Eclipse SDK trying to find occurrences of each blooper. I thought people might be interested in my notes, so here they are in unedited form (thanks also to the discussion group for some useful comments which have been added). The attachment is a Word document: I didn't get all the way through the book. Any entries which are blank haven't been examined. An entry marked N/A means I couldn't find any occurrences, or it otherwise does not apply. Although this does cover several plugins (not just org.eclipse.ui), this is not an exhaustive check of all plugins in the SDK. The intent was just to gather a few examples of each blooper for the discussion group. I highly recommend the book to anyone doing UI development. Although it does not address some of our trickier UI "challenges", such as losing your context in different perspectives / tab folders / editors, etc, it does help raise the "low bar" of overall UI quality. The book is an excellent companion to the various platform UI guidelines (e.g. "Microsoft Windows User Experience"), and is not platform-specific. The doc above includes more details on why I like it. It would help to go through the list with the book in hand, but you can probably get a basic idea of what each blooper is about just from the section headings. The TOC is also online at http://www.gui-bloopers.com/features.html#Contents Nick (See attached file: GUI Bloopers in Eclipse.doc)
Attachment:
GUI Bloopers in Eclipse.doc
Description: MS-Word document