> I’ve had a huge amount of praise for the Launch Bar and the simplification of workflows it provides. We
> can play with the look and feel... . But I find Eclipse’s tool bar buttons useless so don’t want to make
> the launch bar equally useless.
I have to say I've heard the opposite feedback. When I was at BlackBerry, we only had one team member who liked launch bar and he liked it for the workflow benefits, not the giant toolbar buttons. The rest of the team disliked the giant buttons so much they went to elaborate lengths to eliminate the launch bar in order to regain the screen space. My team at Google is much smaller, but we all dislike the big buttons.
I guess we have contradictory anecdotes... so perhaps we shouldn't rely on anecdote.
Maybe you're right and the toolbar buttons in Eclipse are uselessly small. If that's the case, we should update the UI guidelines and make an effort to change all the buttons in Eclipse, not just one toolbar... and before doing such a drastic change, we should make an effort to gather some kind of data (stronger than anecdote) to support the decision.
Until that happens, all toolbars need to follow the UI guidelines. The Eclipse UI is already in a poor state, but if each developer ignores the guidelines they don't like, that makes the UI inconsistent and even worse.
- Stefan