Talk:Eclipse Educational Screencam Planning

Hi Wayne. I'm new to editing Wiki's, so please be sure to let me know if I'm not doing this the best way. From looking at the Wikipedia tutorial, it looks like the "talk" page is the best way to ask questions vs. actually making edits. At this point, I have more questions than edits. Here are some to get started.

1. My focus at this point is to come up with a general plan, simliar to what you have already put on the page, and then figure out which 1 or 2 videos are the most important to start with. Then, I can create the first video and we can use that as a pilot project. Is that similar to what you have in mind?

2. What's the most important priority that training videos could help with? (e.g., make it easier for newbies to get started?)

3. Which do you think is more important: to draw in new people who are new to Java and maybe OOP or to draw in experienced Java developers who are not using Eclipse? (I would guess that it's a harder sell for people who are already familiar with other IDE's, but that is just a guess.) Or are both equally important?

4. For Java / OOP novices, I think a series starting from scratch and building a simple app, including UI, would be good. The nice thing about the video format is that you can show people things and explain them just enough to pique their interest without getting too bogged down. And obviously there are a lot of resources for learning Java.

5. For existing Java developers, we could perhaps start with a "sales demo" video. In other words, we could identify the killer features of Eclipse vs. the leading competitors and make sure to highlight those features ("have you ever had to change a method signature .... with Eclipse it's easy").

Let me know what you think. Thanks.

Another thought on the whole issue of simplyfying the orientation of newcomers -- what about a role-based road map? Something like: If you are a ... , start here ...

Software development manager -- Why Java and why Eclipse; Eclipse as an IDE and a sample RCP application, etc.; Overview of Eclipse Project and Technologies; Business Case for Eclipse.

Experienced developer new to Java and OOP -- Eclipse / Java Absolute Beginner video's

Anyway, just a thought. Thanks.

Yet one more thought. I just went through your Rich Client slide show. I know as a software developer, one of the first things I wanted to see when I was looking at dev platforms was the type of apps you could create. The screen shots of the example apps (ForeFlight, RSS, Nasa, Lotus) are very impressive. Would it be desirable and possible to create short (5-minute) screencam demos of one or more of these products?