Eclipse: Recently I’ve been playing with eclipse + cdt to use it as a GNOME platform development evironement. I needed to rebuild the swt-gtk/mozilla bindings because the binary provided by eclipse.org is linked agains mozilla 1.6, and both, my Fedora Core 3 and my GNOME 2.9 jhbuild env are using 1.7, and of course they are not ABI compatible. The best part of eclipse is that it’s really easy to extend. For example, I’ve been using Red Hat libhover patch to get inline info about glibc functions. I should be able to extract also this kind of function-description XML from GNOME platform gtkdoc. In the meantime, I wrote siple doc plugin to browse the full GNOME documentation inside eclipse. Also tried the ChangeLog plugin, and definitively it’s quicker than a vi myfile; prepareChangeLog.pl; vi ChangeLod; cvs commit sequence. Also tried the bugzilla plugin, but it only works with stock bugzilla, not GNOME customized one. Maybe we should wait until bugzilla 2.18 XML-RPC interface for this stuff. I’m really happy with the function autocompletion and the CVS integration diff-viewer. It would like to see a GLADE ui Builder component based on the Visual Editor Project.
Buddy List: Another issu to take on consideration when designing software is not only user cases, is also “personas” using it. I can understand that most of us (hackers, techies, etc…) are doing IM simultaneously with other task like web sufring, e-mail reading, programming, etc… But not all people is doing this. Maybe a half of my contacts, after eating dinner, sit on front of their computers just to talk over IM. They don’t want to talk to a concrete person, they just want to talk to whoever is online and spend 1 hour only doing that, so they want a full list of every on line buddy, that is a buddy list or a “search for all my online buddies groupped by groups”