Re: [ide-dev] Some Infos About Oomph

[Eike Stepper <stepper@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Am 12.02.2015 um 10:23 schrieb Mickael Istria:

Hi Eike, hi all,

So I've finally tried Oomph, as it is available on Mars M5; and I've been a "dummy" user of it.

I'm posting there since I believe those discussion have impact on the whole IDE experience.

First impression is that Oomph is useful and allowing to highlight the most controversial preferences is a good thing. That's already a great step forward and I believe it's a nice way to welcome users in the IDE.
Also, I realized that -as you explained me earlier- profiles and other technical details are totally hidden, so it's easy and accessible for any user. That's also a very good thing.

Now, let's discuss a few things I find under-optimal in it:
* First, UI is not reactive (at least on GTK3): Feedback when hovering on elements is not systematic, and is often slow. We've often heard "Eclipse is slow", it has become less and less frequent (also because other IDEs are becoming slower as well ;) , and I'm afraid that this will bring back a first impression of slowness for Eclipse.

* Then UI is inconsistent with the IDE:

Yes, it took me 2 weeks to come up with something that creates a modern, fresh experience. The first real users that saw it sent me comments like "The new Ooomph wizard looks too cool to be eclipse. But when it goes away I feel a bit sad only looking at plain old eclipse ;-( ".

I don't think that introducing a new UI paradigm at first glance of the IDE is something good for the consistency. Similarly to the slowness, consistency of UI has also been criticized by users. I have the impression that having a non-JFace UI

Such as the Welcome page.

at first sight of the IDE is inconsistent with the whole IDE experience, and can give a bad first impression.

Our other feedback was totally different, absolutely positive, so far.

Moreover, the setup Wizard is a Wizard after all; it would totally fit in a JFace Wizard (with the traditional title/description ribbon replaced by the moving gears if you like them so much ;)
* Then the wizard says "Welcome to Eclipse Oomph". End-users just downloaded Eclipse, and they don't know (and most likely don't need/want to know about Oomph). What they are expecting when downloading Eclipse is to read "Welcome to Eclipse"

Yes, now that Oomph is in all packages and people no longer install it knowingly this make sense. There is https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=456710

, or if you want to be more RCP-friendly "Welcome to ${Platform.getProduct().getName()}" like in the About... menu
* And finally, and that's a more tricky one in term of IDE design, we have a Welcome page, and a Oomph wizard that says "Welcome".... There is definitely some overlap in term of goal there, and keeping both isn't a good user experience, and would just highlight that "Eclipse developers prefer keeping 2 messy things

Can you elaborate on what exactly you think is messy?

instead of creating a clean one". I see 2 possible ways of making those more consistent: Move the Oomph wizard in the Welcome Page (tricky),

That would be nice, but yes, probably very tricky. Also I have the feeling that the Welcome page is not used a lot. In addition the Welcome page shows up each time a new IDE is installed and our goal was to ask users only once in their lifetime. But I guess that could be accomplished in the Welcome page, too.

Cheers
/Eike

----
http://www.esc-net.de
http://thegordian.blogspot.com
http://twitter.com/eikestepper

or -my favorite-, get rid of the Welcome page. I'd be curious to see whether even new Eclipse users use this welcome page. It's just a bunch of links to some documentation pages, but who reads documentation? The Oomph wizard provides much more value than the welcome page.

Do you think I should open bug requests for some of those points? Or should we keep discussion on mailing-list first until we get to concrete simple action items?

--
Mickael Istria
Eclipse developer at JBoss, by Red Hat
My blog - My Tweets

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