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Tip of the Day
The Eclipse Tip of the Day framework enables users to see Eclipse Tips during startup and enable extenders to provide tips for their specific bundles.
The TOTD UI looks like this:
TipProviders are selected based on their importance in the current context. For example, if the Java perspective is open, you are likely to get Java tips. If the PDE perspective is open, you are likely to get PDE tips.
Contents
Installing
The Tip of the Day feature is available in the nightly builds. After restart the framework should fetch some data from the downloads area and present 4 tip providers with new tips.
Early testing feedback on bug 534347
- Help/Install new software
- Add this repo http://download.eclipse.org/eclipse/updates/4.8-I-builds
- Uncheck "Group Items by Category"
- Search for Tips
- Install and restart.
Extending IDE Tips
Extenders are able to use and extension point that provides a TipProvider subclass to serve Tip objects. Tips can be read from a JSon file or can be manually crafted. In the latter case you create tips from HTML, and URL or have complete freedom by providing an SWT tip.
Examples on how each of these work can be found in the tip examples here:
JSon Tip Provider
A JSon Tip provider requires a JSon file with information. The TipProvider implementation can be very simple. A JSon file can be placed on the internet and be maintained dynamically. You can pull down this file if the change date was changed (use the HTTP HEAD function) or pull it down every time the provider is started.
Examples
Wiki Tips
Tips can be retrieved from the Eclipse Wiki. The TipProvider may read tip URLs from a page and create Tip objects from a link. Examples in the framework provide tips from the following page:
Twitter Tips
Tips can be retrieved from Twitter using the embedded link.