Where do I click? Making Eclipse Applications User-Friendly

Alexandra Imrie (BREDEX GmbH), Achim Loerke (BREDEX GmbH)

Eclipse Platform - UI / RCP · Short - 25 minutes
Tuesday, 10:35, 25 minutes | Great America 1

Alexandra Imrie

Achim Loerke

An application that works is only half the battle. If the user doesn't understand it, they'll never be able to appreciate all the wonderful features. They may not even get past the first steps.

Fortunately, Eclipse doesn't just offer a development environment for applications, it also contains a wide range of help sources for users. This talk covers some of the opportunities available to teams developing Eclipse applications to make them more user friendly, and to reduce the amount of documentation a user has to read to understand a program.

Topics covered will include the Welcome Pages, cheat sheets, context-sensitive help, context-sensitive tooltips on GUI components, "nag dialogs" and will also include references to the Eclipse Style Guide.

The talk is suited to both technical and non-technical participants. Each area will first be discussed in terms of what it is, how it can be used to make the user experience better, and tips and tricks for using it in projects. After the presentation of each feature, the implementation details will be shown and discussed, so that technical participants can see how these features can be incorporated into applications.

Alexandra earned a degree and an MA in linguistics from York University before starting work at Bredex GmbH. She is engaged in various roles in the product development process, including conception, design and planning as well as documentation, web demos and customer support. Currently she is also learning Java to understand what these software developers are talking about.

Achim Loerke started software development in 1982 after earning his diploma in electronics. He began working at BREDEX GmbH in 1987 and is now co-owner and director of the company. Beginning in 1995 he successfully utilized Java in several customer projects. He is also the principal architect of GUIdancer, a commercial Eclipse based tool for automated testing of Swing, SWT/RCP and HTML GUIs. Doing consulting and project management for customers gives him ample opportunities to apply his favorite subject of automated software quality assurance and automated testing. In addition he represents his company as an Eclipse Foundation member. Achim is a committer for the Eclipse ORMF technology project.