BTW, the buttons keep shrinking so we keep adjusting. They’re a lot smaller than the BB10 days. And I’m happy to adjust things, but as an every day user of it, I think it’s hit the sweet spot.
Also the document Sergey references is 8 years old. Sorry, was off by two years. The UI world has changed a lot since 2007 as UX people finally have influence on the UIs we are building.
The Launch Bar was designed by professional UX designers trying to meet the needs of new users to make Eclipse less overwhelming with the mass of tiny tool bar buttons we throw at them. I understand that most of us are advanced users and are used to the
mess and some even like it, but hopefully there are way more beginner users since that’s how we grow the community. Please have them in mind when discussing these issues.
Also, please hold judgement until you’ve tried it. Check out the Arduino video I’ve posted and I’ll post one for Qt once we get it more full featured. The workflows are beautiful and will really help bring new users into Eclipse. And as an advanced user,
I can’t live without it, same with others I know who’ve used it extensively.
At any rate, the Launch Bar is intended to be optional. Though how you set the active target for a given launch configuration will still need some UI for launch configurations that need it.
And I’ll make adjustments to the architecture as the need arises. We’re still early days. What I won’t compromise on is tying builds to the things you are trying to launch on. The workflows are just too good when you do that.
Doug.
> 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
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