Re: Eclipse interface terminology

["CL T" <straylightsghost -at- gmail -dot- com>]

I would take a look at Adobe's FLEX documentation for insight. Flex is also
developed on an Eclipse platform.


-Collin



On Fri, Nov 14, 2008 at 9:48 AM, MDoyle TStorer <storerdoyle -at- gmail -dot- com>wrote:

> The company where I work as an editor is producing an application developed
> using the Eclipse development environment. The interface real estate of the
> application largely mimics that of the Eclipse workbench. The writers (and
> I) are wondering how to refer to the interface elements. I've been looking
> at the Eclipse User Interface Guidelines available at:
> http://wiki.eclipse.org/User_Interface_Guidelines,
> but these are mainly for the Eclipse workbench itself. I would be
> interested
> to hear how other technical writers are approaching Eclipse-designed
> applications.
>
> The application window contains perspectives. "A perspective is a visual
> container for a set of views and content editors," says the guideline, and
> "A perspective is like a page within a book. It exists within a window
> along
> with any number of other perspectives and, like a page within a book, only
> one perspective is visible at any time." Individual views can have tabs and
> tabs can have subtabs. Perspectives and views do not always have titles. To
> be honest, I'm not entirely sure when I'm looking at a view and when I'm
> looking at a perspective, and whether or not multiple tabs in a view mean
> the view is really a perspective (where each tab is a view).
>
> To me, the perspective/view terminology is not intuitive and would need to
> be defined, but in an online help system users are not always going to look
> for the topic that defines interface terminology. Windows, panes, areas,
> sections, zones, perspectives, views, tabs... the number of possible words
> to describe a user interface seems to be endless. Making it trickier to
> document is the fact that you can often pull the pieces around the screen
> and position them where you will; you can open and close them one by one;
> even when they're open, you can hide content by pushing it either up and
> down or to either side, with the space then being filled by adjacent
> content. This can easily lead to situations where users customize the
> display without realizing quite what they're doing, and are then confused
> about what they're looking at and how to return to the default display.
> Consistent, clear ways to talk about interface components is therefore all
> the more necessary in the online help.
>
> If anyone has any bright ideas or useful links or books to point me to, I
> would be very grateful! Thanks in advance.
>
> - Tom Storer
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