I like to pay attention to things that affect Eclipse, but outside the Eclipse community. In particular, I like reading Mary Beth Raven‘s design blog used to gather feedback about the design of the new version of Notes (that is based on Eclipse). It seems there is an interesting conundrum regarding how plug-ins should be perceived by “Samantha” (design persona for joe user). Most of us in the Eclipse community are developers and are used to the concept of plug-ins, but now it seems like the notion of plug-ins will be available to a whole new set of users. Do normal users understand plug-ins? Should they be renamed to something else? I think this is a fairly interesting discussion so I linked Mary Beth’s blog if people want to comment.
