Thanks for posting the results of our discussion. Please find some comments below:
On Fri, Oct 1, 2010 at 3:30 AM, Ian Skerrett
<ian.skerrett@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
I would like to kick-off a discussion on what future improvements we
should explore for the Marketplace Client. David and I had the
opportunity to meet face to face to talk about some ideas but I
would like to get feedback from the entire project team.
There are two themes that I would like to suggest: 1) Get more
people to use MPC and 2) Usability.
Theme: Get More People to Use MPC
1. Allow users to share a list of their installed products to a
friend.
- It would be ideal for someone to be able to go to the installed
tab and share their lists with other people. This would encourage
other people to take the list and use MPC.
What form do you think this should take? Would users share via email, or some other channel? To me this sharing feature sounds great, and would ideally make use of 2, below.
2. Ability to launch an install from outside of Eclipse MPC
- The ideal would be to allow solution providers to advertise the
ability to install their product from MPC. From the solution
provider web site, the end user could drag a url to an Eclipse
install and this would automatically start MPC install for that
solution. This would allow companies to help promote MPC to their
customers, instead of promoting update sites or download zip files.
I'm not sure what you mean by 'drag an URL'.
I'm not sure how feasible this is, but it would be great if we could use Eclipse's new
open file feature. Providers would be able to use 1 above to save their favorites as a file, and then serve that file from their web site. Clicking the URL would download the file, which would be associated with Eclipse via a file extension. The browser would offer to open the file, which would launch Eclipse with the Marketplace offering to install the selected components. The Eclipse Marketplace website could also serve up these files for commonly used installation profiles.
Theme: Usability
1. We need to make it more obvious the existence of the different
marketplace catalogs. I'd like to see better skinning for an
external catalog and have icons at the bottom for the different
catalogs, instead of having to go to another link.
Skinning should be limited so that the UI guidelines cannot be violated. Perhaps rather than skinning we should allow for simple branding to be applied to the dialog title and message area.
2. We should look at showing the tags that have been defined for
solution and allow the end user to search on the tags.
Agreed, searching by tag would be very useful.
3. A search results should be paginated. Right now an end user must
go to the embedded browser.
Paginated search results would make the search capability much more useful. Currently searching is painful when lots of matches are found, since it's only possible to see the first few. It's not obvious what 'browse for more solutions' means, or how the embedded browser should be used.
Any other suggestions for themes or features under these themes?
Looks good to me!
David
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