Monday, June 25, 2012

Eclipse UI Tips for Android

As an Eclipse plug-in developer I am always looking for guidelines how to design my UI for the best user experience. Although not updated for quite a long time, the User Interface Guidelines wiki page is the best source of information I am familiar with. It's quite a lot of reading (big thanks to the contributors), but the time spent on reading really worth.

Recently, I counted that there are exactly 144 guidelines described. Quite a lot, isn't it? Of course, there is a short list of the most important 18 guidelines, but this doesn't mean that I should neglect the other 126. Therefore, I was looking for an easy way to remember them all.

It's quite modern now-a-days to use a smartphone for making one's life easier. I created a simple Android app that fires a status bar notification every morning with a randomly selected Eclipse UI guideline. This would remind me one of these guidelines every day. Since they are 144 total, this should keep me busy for nearly half a year and then for sure I would need to do another round :)

I published the application to Google Play, so you can try it yourself if you find this idea useful. The code is available as open source under EPL on github.

Android app on Google Play

Please, note that I have designed the application to fit my own needs. It's very likely that you have a different style of learning. I am open for feedback, request for improvements and patches. You are welcome to fork the project and submit your requests in the issue tracking system of github.

Monday, June 4, 2012

Eclipse Demo Camp in Sofia on June 18th


Photo by sergi_nog

I am pleased to announce that just in a couple of weeks the 5th Eclipse Demo Camp in Sofia will take place. This time I am not in the organization, but there is a gang of extremely enthusiastic fellows who wish to continue the tradition.

The special guest this time is Ralph Mueller - Director in Eclipse Foundation who is focused on growing the Eclipse community in Europe. We are also expecting some other guests from abroad.

Of course, the most important content of an Eclipse Demo Camp are the demos prepared by you - the Eclipse geeks. So, if you have something interesting to show, please sign up in the wiki page.

If you plan to attend then please follow the instructions how to register, so you can make the organization of the event easier.

Let's make this Demo Camp the best one!