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Kim Moir pointed out in her post the other day that Eclipse community is like family. Rightly said! The Eclipse Indian "Family" is huddling-up tomorrow at Bangalore for Eclipse Day India. Its an exciting time for all of us out here in the sub-continent. Just as I am adding the finishing touches to my talk, I am also figuring out which talks to attend. I'll start off with the keynote. Thanks to the volcano (whose name I cannot pronounce), Rajesh Thakkar will be delivering the keynote. "G-Eclipse made Cloud easy !", "OSGi Tutorial", "Let us ship it!" is my list for the morning session. Post-lunch its going to be "Splash Screen++ by Jagadeesh" (I know, the schedule says Creating Splash Screen but i've seen this guy and u don't want to overlook this lightning talk). Then its Patterns time!! "Patterns in Eclipse by Madhu Samuel." Gulp down some tea and finish up the day with "RAP" and "Unconference." The schedule can be found here.
The last part of the day will be particularly interesting - Unconference! This is like: walk-in, register, color up the unconference board with a topic, and talk. If your talk put up on the unconference board has good enough votes you will get to speak.
See you tomorrow!
EclipseCon 2010 is wrapped up. Thanks to the community I followed the happenings of EclipseCon on planeteclipse.org and twitter - almost like live updates. The Indian Eclipse community is gearing up for a gathering in similar proportions (in the community energy level of course.) Eclipse Day India 2010 is here - April 23rd. What I like most about it is the simplicity. Just 3 kinds of talks: Lightning, Short, and Long.
Now that the tentative agenda is out and its difficult to not choose to attend one talk over another considering the submissions. I have made my list of "favorite talks to attend." The key note is interesting. It is called "The Eclipse Way" by Dani Megert. More details about the key note here. I want to start off with lightning talks. Especially "Top 10 mistakes in Eclipse Plug-in development" by Prakash G R and "Creating a splash screen" by Jagadeesh Panchakshari. Behold! The latter lightning talk is more than its name. Most of us (or atleast I) think of an Image when it comes to a 'splash screen' but Jagadeesh has some surprises in store for us. Moving on to Short talks. I want to check out "Contributing to Eclipse and Community" by Ayushman Jain, "RAP" by Ankur Sharma, "Top 3 SWT Exceptions" by Lakshmi. Finally, finish up with "Patterns in Eclipse" by Madhu Samuel , "OSGi Tutorial" by Prakash G R. Hope the talks are scheduled in such a way that I don't miss any of my favorites :)
The final agenda will be published here - keep watching.
Everyone who's used any MS office application would have come across this annoying yet sometimes useful Office assistant. He's there to "point" us in the right direction to do something. If we've got questions (as silly as how to wrap text) he may have the "answers".
I was wondering ... RCP has a very nice help system in the form of cheatsheets, balloon help, context based help, status bar messages, etc... which will prompt the user for action/attention as required. But the help system doesn't have something like a help assistant - similar to the ones in MS Office applications. Eclipse RCP as an application is used in a variety of domains (hell even Swiss Railway people use it!) we get users who aren't aware as much and aren't willing to experiment or search to find out. I'll share some inputs I got from users who don't know much the Eclipse UI way. There are a some of them who say "How do I know that i have to right-click on the wizard to get a context-menu full of options ?" We can provide a message in the wizard page ... but that may be hard to notice.
I feel RCP help assistant widget is a better HMI mechanism than the usual status bar messages. May be the widget can be a very low on graphics, animation and high on usefulness. This is just an idea ... I thought I'll share.
