Mylyn WikiText Experiences from EclipseCon 2009

I presented my session titled "WikiText: Generate Eclipse Help from Eclipsepedia" (about Mylyn WikiText) at EclipseCon 2009. I had a lot of fun and lots of positive feedback. If you're interested in the slides from my presentation, you can find them here. A couple of interesting experiences from EclipseCon:

Trying Something New

Before the presentation I saw the Keynote Remote application for iPhone. Thinking it would be fun, I tried it for the first time while presenting my session. It turns out that to control slides you must swipe, which means that you need to know the orientation of your iPhone. Every time you want to change slides you have to look at your phone. Very distracting for both the presenter and the audience.

I learned the hard way something that I already knew: don't try anything new in a presentation!

Twitter

Twitter helped to create a buzz both before, during and after my session. The best thing about it for me was that I got immediate feedback on my presentation even before it was over.

iPhone Alarm

Beware that your iPhone alarm will sound even if the quiet switch has been activated. I discovered this design feature as Mike Milinkovich, the executive director of the Eclipse foundation was presenting. I think he was as surprised as me when the get-to-a-bomb-shelter-now siren sounded from my phone's alarm. Sorry Mike!

All in all I had a great time. I highly recommend EclipseCon for those who wish to meet interesting people with a common focus and lots of ideas.

Mylyn WikiText 1.0 Released

I'm pleased to announce that Mylyn WikiText 1.0 has been released as part of Mylyn 3.1. Mylyn WikiText provides lightweight markup (wiki) parsing and editing capabilities to the Eclipse platform, Mylyn, Ant and stand-alone applications. Mylyn WikiText is the result of more than a year of development and over 170 bug fixes and enhancements. This marks the first release of WikiText after its move from the Textile-J project. Many thanks to the Mylyn team and the Eclipse community for making this possible. Here are some of the highlights:

Mylyn Task Editor Integration

With WikiText the Mylyn task editor is now markup-aware, providing source formatting, integrated preview, content assist and markup help. The following shows how markup can be authored and previewed in the task editor:

WikiText selects the markup language that best suits your task repository. This is great for users of JIRA, Trac and other repositories that provide support for wiki markup in task descriptions and comments. Users can also benefit from using wiki markup with task repositories such as Bugzilla that don't provide support for wiki markup.

Eclipse Integration

WikiText provides an editor for files containing wiki markup:

WikiText provides support for several markup languages, including MediaWiki, Textile, Confluence, TracWiki and TWiki. WikiText also provides an extensible parser framework for adding support for other markup languages.

Ant Integration

Users of Apache Ant now have access to Ant tasks for transforming wiki markup to alternative formats such as HTML, Eclipse Help, DocBook and OASIS DITA.

RCP, SWT and Server Applications

WikiText provides public APIs for integrating wiki markup capabilities into RCP applications and stand-alone SWT applications. These APIs make it easy to display markup and inspect its structure.

WikiText can also be used server-side to transform markup in web applications.

WikiText In The Field

WikiText is being used in many interesting ways:

• The Mylyn project uses WikiText to convert MediaWiki content from Eclipsepedia to Eclipse Help content.
• Mylyn WikiText authors help content in Textile and converts it at build time to Ecilpse Help content.
• A recent addition to the Eclipse Examples project uses WikiText to create slide presentations based on files authored in MediaWiki markup.

Mylyn WikiText will also be presented at EclipseCon 2009 in WikiText: Generate Eclipse Help from Eclipsepedia.

More Information

Mylyn WikiText can be installed using an Eclipse update site or by downloading the standalone jars. See Mylyn downloads for details.

For more information about WikiText, see the Mylyn 3.1 New and Noteworthy, Mylyn FAQ or the Mylyn homepage.

Open Type Dialog - Small Things Make A Big Difference

I'm a big fan of attention to detail when creating tooling for developers. Our brains are tuned to notice the smallest perceptible visual clues. We can absorb a lot of information with the right visual cues, however presenting that information without adding clutter to an IDE is a real challenge.

The JDT team has mangaged to improve the Open Type dialog in Eclipse 3.5 without falling into the trap of a cluttered interface:



Notice how a bold font is being used to identify regions of text that match the filter. The JDT team is using a new platform feature where multiple fonts can be used in one cell. Here's what it used to look like:



The best thing about this new feature is that my brain doesn't have to work harder to know more -- it's immediately evident to me which matches are better and why without having to think about it.

The importance of eliminating and minimizing visual noise is evidenced by products such as Mylyn that are designed to do just that: filter out what you don't need.

Kudos to the JDT team for raising the bar. I can't wait for Eclipse 3.5 Galileo to be released this summer.