I was talking with a colleague of mine today who is starting to have his company move their tool-suite to Eclipse. He asked me to review the UI a bit so I gladly did. I noticed quite a few things that bothered me but basically all the things that bothered me had a common theme. Let’s take the properties view for example:
What I saw was quite a few custom properties views that all tried to get around the deficiencies in the basic properties view. One example was even striking because it was Eclipse Forms based. I than told my colleague about the tabbed properties view in Eclipse:
His response was pretty much, “well, how am I supposed to know that exists?” It’s a fair response given the breadth of technology that is available for you when building Eclipse-based applications. One question we should put forward when diving into E4 is how do we combat this issue? Is it a lack of pre-canned templates for people to use? A lack of books or articles? I’m not sure but this problem is close to my heart as my main interest in E4 is making the life of plug-in developers easier.
Food for thought I guess 🙂