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Re: [platform-ui-dev] RE: UI Status followup

Amy

Just go to 
http://dev.eclipse.org/viewcvs/index.cgi/%7Echeckout%7E/platform-ui-home/preferences/preferences.html 
and follow the instructions there. You are generally best to try this with 
the workbench loaded from HEAD as work is ongoing in this area. Please 
bear in mind this is a work in progress and things will likely look 
different by the time 3.1 ships.

Tod





Amy Wu <amywu@xxxxxxxxxx> 
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11/22/2004 03:51 PM
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Re: [platform-ui-dev] RE: UI Status followup







It would be nice to have 1 standard shortcut key combination to open 
specially configured preference pages/preferences dialog.  The preferences 
shown would be based on the context of where you pressed the shortcut.  It 
would be like pressing F1 for infopops in various places.  This would work 
nicely with the other suggestions about a preferences UI engine that could 
generate preference controls on the fly (which sounds good considering all 
the inconsistent/duplicate ways people are creating preferences controls 
now). 

Also, is there a way to see the new preferences dialog in action with a 
recent 3.1 build? 





Michael Van Meekeren <Michael_Van_Meekeren@xxxxxxxxxx> 
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11/22/2004 01:48 PM 

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Re: [platform-ui-dev] RE: UI Status followup









Thanks we'll look into it, I'm not to good at remembering all those key 
combinations, but I can't seem to find this Ctrl+Shift+L key defined by 
the SDK in R3.0.  Could you mean Format which is Ctrl+Shift+F? 

/michael 

Randy Hudson <hudsonr@xxxxxxxxxx> 
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11/22/2004 12:55 PM 

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Need I mention that Ctrl+Shift+L is already defined as "Format Element" in 
3.0?? 

Michael Van Meekeren <Michael_Van_Meekeren@xxxxxxxxxx> 
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11/19/2004 02:47 PM 

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There has been some progress on this for example, we now support opening 
the preference dialog to a page with some configurability.  From inside 
Eclipse type Ctrl+Shift+L (this opens the popup showing current key 
bindings available), then select an item (not required) in the list and 
press Ctrl+Shift+L again and you are taken directly to the key bindings 
preference page with the selected key chosen to be viewed/edited. 

/michael 
Randy Hudson <hudsonr@xxxxxxxxxx> 
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11/18/2004 04:27 PM 

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Re: [platform-ui-dev] RE: UI Status followup















My main complaint about the preference dialog is that I have to use it. 
For example, for editor quick-diff settings, I should be able to 
right-click on the java editor's ruler, select "Quick Diff..." and edit 
preferences *only* for quick diffs.  If the use of the global prefrence 
dialog were discouraged, the complexity/scalability wouldn't be so 
important.  I thought this was a goal of the preference swat team. 

-Randy Hudson 
"Ed Burnette" <Ed.Burnette@xxxxxxx> 
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Michael suggested I follow up here. The prototype looks pretty busy to me 
with navigation across the top, down the left side, and in the content 
area in the form of tabs.

It's always struck me as a usability problem that some preferences pages 
are heavily into tabs and some aren't and some use a combination of tab 
pages and tree nodes on the left. I know that different components have 
different numbers of preferences but this is pretty confusing to even 
experienced users. If the preferences dynamic team can straighten all that 
out it would be very welcome.

Two interesting models that I think demonstrate some fresh, good ideas for 
preferences UI are the Options dialog in Firefox (
http://www.mozilla.org/firefox) and both the main interface and options 
dialog of the MySQL Administrator (
http://dev.mysql.com/downloads/administrator).

I suggest a data-driven approach. You already have the concept of field 
editors and preference categories. Go a bit further, and instead of having 
preference page designers painstakingly build up an SWT composite by hand, 
let us give the preferences UI engine enough info so it could generate the 
whole interface on the fly

For example, look at the Workbench > Search preferences. You have some 
boolean options, you have a color option, you have a text option that can 
be disabled, and you have an option that takes a value out of a list. This 
could all be described in some simple XML. With a few exceptions I'll bet 
almost all the preferences could be handled that way.

You list height/width problems as an issue - dynamically generating the 
pages would help address that wouldn't it? There's a bugzilla open for 
filtering/searching, and having metadata for all the preferences would 
help that too. It would help capabilities as individual options could be 
visible or hidden based on the capabilities, not just whole preference 
pages. It would help making the presentation of the preferences common 
across all plug-ins (rather than everybody doing their own rendering as 
currently). It would eventually allow alternate UI presentations for the 
preferences (future versions could render it differently, and some RCP 
apps might prefer tree representions, some might want to do the whole 
thing in Swing, and some might want a long scrollable list, etc.).

Also it would reduce developer time trying to squeeze in an option in a 
preference page here or there, and reduce the opportunities for error 
cutting and pasting all the boilerplate get/set/default code that's 
currently needed. That's probably why many preferences that exist in the 
code aren't surfaced in the UI; it's too much of a pain.

________________________________

            From: eclipse-dev-admin@xxxxxxxxxxx 
[mailto:eclipse-dev-admin@xxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Michael Van Meekeren
            Sent: Thursday, November 18, 2004 10:50 AM
            To: eclipse-dev@xxxxxxxxxxx
            Subject: [eclipse-dev] UI Status followup
 
 

 
            As a followup to the status note about preferences, a sample 
image has been linked to the Preferences Dynamic team page. 
            
http://dev.eclipse.org/viewcvs/index.cgi/%7Echeckout%7E/platform-ui-home/R3_1/dynamic_teams/dynamic_teams.html#preferences 

 
            click here to go directly to it, note that it is just a 
prototype: 
            
http://dev.eclipse.org/viewcvs/index.cgi/%7Echeckout%7E/platform-ui-home/R3_1/dynamic_teams/pref_snapshot.PNG 

 
 
            /michael

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