Re: [ecf-dev] debug popup window in XMPP

[Dann Martens <dann@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi,

Overall, I find the way IM is handled in ECF not that straightforward in terms of usability.

IMHO, the Communications Perspective is at odds with what I expect from any other Eclipse Perspective, in the sense that perspectives have a 'vertical' aspect to them and communication itself a 'horizontal' aspect. I would expect communications to be cross-cutting, available in any perspective, as an added feature. Its quite tedious to have to set up a connection, by having to switch to a perspective, first.

I've been re-evaluating some of these issues with Galileo, and there is a check-box 'Display ECF collaboration outside of the workbench' which shows a modest Toaster Pop-up.
In terms of UX, a docked view appearing out of the blue prompted by an incoming message feels like it violates a number of UI principles, including Eclipse best-practices. That still happens with the 'outside' option enabled. At best, that could be a very specialized good-will option for those with a very specific use case.

It feels as if the UX priorities are upside-down in ECF at the moment. That's probably a historical thing, but I hope these issues can be addressed in the future.

If you compare this to Mylyn approach: they have a great implementation of Toaster Pop-ups to deal with this kind of asynchronous communication. Overall, Mylyn does behave more 'horizontal', as I would expect.

Comments would be appreciated!

Best regards,
 Dann
 

Remy Suen wrote:

On Wed, Jul 29, 2009 at 6:44 PM, Scott Lewis<slewis@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> I think the thinking was that within Eclipse, it might be considered
> distracting to have the message view popup with every message receive (as
> this would take focus away from other things the user might be doing...e.g.
> editing, navigating through resources, etc).

This is intentional. Subsequent messages would be notified to the user via the view's title becoming bold (or maybe it was italicized). I've not used an IM client that gave me a popup on every message I received so it was implemented this way. Admittedly, IM clients would make the window flash in the task bar if a new message was received. This is not done in this case. I'm not sure if this is possible with SWT APIs off-hand, if it is then that should probably be used.

If you would like to submit a patch to ensure that popups always appear, feel free.

Remy

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