Mylyn/UI Design

This page will be used to collect materials related to the design of Mylar's Focused UI. Please consider adding a screenshot of how you use Mylar to help inform the UI decisions discussed on bug reports.

Idioms

Avoid Hierarchies

While we are always tempted to add hierarchies to the Task List and there is never a lack of requests to do so, this is something that we have to proceed with very carefully because hiearchies are much dramatically more difficult to interact with and use than monocline lists. In general the Mylyn UI design attempts to follow the simpler monocline grouping metaphor over the hierarchical metaphor.

Usage Problems

Context blank when forking tasks

• Michael Scharf: flash movie demonstrating problem
  • http://www.scharf.gr/eclipse/Probmens/Mylar/ContextProblem/

• It is been suggested to copy active context into newly created task. That will help in the situation like Michael demonstrated, so in worst case user would have to clean copied context or mark certain part of it uninteresting in a scope of new task.

References

Using links vs. buttons in UI:

• http://wiki.eclipse.org/index.php/Links_and_Buttons
• http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa511456.aspx
• http://www.useit.com/alertbox/command-links.html