On the plane to Boston, I managed to fairly quickly implement something I’ve wanted in a messaging client for years, the ability to quickly browse and message a contact via a keybinding to prevent the usage of the mouse (similar to how Ctrl+Shift+T in Eclipse rocks).
I implemented this feature for ECF (which is becoming my main chat client since it’s nice to have it all within Eclipse). How did I do this? Well, I used the wonderful FilteredItemsSelectionDialog from the Platform. And by wonderful, I mean it was wonderful once I got everything working 😀 I then took advantage of the new Platform Command Framework to wire things together (there was a PDE template that helped me with this). Look for this functionality post 1.0 ECF. I encourage people to file bugs and feature enhancements against ECF to make it more fully-featured.