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What UI mockup tools exist that could be used to produce designs that look like Eclipse UI? Perhaps there is an Eclipse project available for this? (http://www.eclipse.org/projects/listofprojects.php doesn't make it easy to browse through all the projects and learn about them.) I would consider tools for any platform.
They are wireframe sketches rather than Eclipse-UI like mockups, but I find http://wireframesketcher.com/ or http://marketplace.eclipse.org/content/wireframesketcher very useful.
It's quick and easy to use, see the feature list here:
http://wireframesketcher.com/features.html
One thing they don't seem to mention there is their SWT Spy plugin which "allows you to convert your existing SWT UI into a wireframe that you can edit and revise afterwards" (their words from the help content of the wireframe sketcher feature).
They have a 14 day trial.
I ended up buying SwordSoft Layout in the Mac OS X App Store. It's inexpensive ($6.99) and easy to use. While it doesn't have Eclipse-specific templates, it wasn't hard to create mockups that looked close enough to what I'm proposing.
We use balsamiq Balsamiq site. You can use their web version for free. Web version
However, the web version doesn't save. So you need to manually store the xml. Use export as xml and copy paste to a local file and use again import as xml to restart.
You can take a look at ForeUI, which can help creating UI mockup with various styles (Handdrawn, Wireframe, Windows xp, Mac OS X and Windows 7), and allows you to define behavior of your mockup then run HTML5 simulation in web browser.
For reference, Eclipse has a project
http://eclipse.org/windowbuilder/
that actually can be used for constructing plugin mockups and to start off the plugin project through generating much of the UI stuff. Since it is an Eclipse project using all Eclipse artefacts as they show in Eclipse, there's probably no better tool at the moment.
You can use MockupUI. It is a desktop user interface mockup software. Not using Eclipse, but it lets you draw high fidelity UI screens with a native Windows 7,8 or 10 look and feel.
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I would start a J2SE projects for abuntu OS.
I try both Netbeans GUI builder and Eclipse windowbuilder.
Both of them are good, drag&drop, double-click to create event-handler like VisualStudio.
However i have do a research on Netbeans, someone said:
The second major flaw of Matisse is that it just isn't good enough,
you place the components on the grid, Matisse then creates an XML with
the component's attributes, then generates the java code for the
components on the grid. Seems cool, but then you decide you want to
add a button somewhere in the form or resize a component - this
procedure can cause all of the gui to get mixed up throwing the
adjacent components to different places - fixing it can be a pain in
the neck. Even if you managed to place all of the components where
they should be but manually changed some of the generated netbeans
code - you are in a BIG problem, a problem you might not manage to get
out of unless starting all over.
Is that bug still exist on latest netbeans?
What is Pros. and Cons. between Netbeans GUI builder and Eclipse Windowbuilder?
Im using NetBeans since 6.x and never had such problems. Resizing components, adding some new, even working on the generated code etc. is realy easy and had no problem so far. Moreover NB has a visual debugger and an improved GridBagLayout customizer (both since 7.1).
Didn't use Eclipse Windowbuilder so far, but i guess its capable too. Everyone has it's own criteria for a gui builder. Btw. the author of this article seem very eclipse-focused ("on the best IDE out there - eclipse")
I'm sorry i cant give you an answer like "pro / cons of A, pro / cons of B" - as i said i've never used Eclipse Windowbuilder before. And for me there's no need to do so, i can build a gui with netbeans without problems / very easy / fast (even better than with Visual Studio). For my point of view everything works like i want it :-)
If you used both, maybe there are things you prefer or dislike on one IDE, but the other can do better.
Personally, while WindowBuilder is a pretty powerful tool to use within Eclipse, I find it more clunky (and quite honestly, prefer to write Swing GUIs by hand if this were the only optin)
Matisse is a far better option because of the Grid editors like someone mentioned previously, also I prefer the way Matisse handles event handlers over WindowBuilder. Another thing Matisse does well is that it encorporates more properties into GUI element settings where WindowBuilder goes over a very small list of changeable features (leaving you to dive through a mess of auto-generated code to change a simple property).
Eclipse does have a version of matisse available, though the plugin is not for free (look up myeclipse).
I used both Eclipse and Netbeans,
Eclipse -WindowBuilder is a powerful tool, easy to modifying it. But causes more code problems. Long time after you will get Spagetti-Codes to get solve problem.When it get problem you cant open Desing layer.
Netbeans generates codes much easy, and you can change it but more harder, sometimes you can't. But i dont get any (only a few, my mistakes) any code problems...or etc., if you get a problem about a component; you can too easy to get Default Settings any time.
Note: THAT IS ONLY MY IDEA!
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I'm looking for a tool to give me some code metrics (total LOCs, LOC/Class, # of external references/class, etc...).
Does anyone know a good eclipse plugin that could provide me some some code metrics?
CodePro AnalytiX originally form Instantiations is now free at Google:
http://code.google.com/javadevtools/download-codepro.html
here is one called Metrics.
edit:
i put together a short program for this screenshot in eclipse 3.3.1.1:
Edit 2
Metrics New version Thanks #mpartel for the link
Sorry for the necropost but it seems like the right thing to do since this was my starting point. Try Metrics2, its a fork of the original metrics plugin and is built for Eclipse 3.5.
There is an updated version of the Metrics plug-in described above that should do what you need. It can aggregate some of the measurements (e.g. add up the LOC of classes in a package to give you the LOC of the package) and export the measurements to XML. Some time in the near future, it should also export them to a relational database.
If you want LOC only then use locmetric http://www.locmetrics.com/ . and if you want check metric and code coverage usse SONAR or Eclips CodePro Analytix plugin.
i suggest to use https://developers.google.com/java-dev-tools/codepro/doc/ it has Automated tools measure quality of Java source code and code coverage
A search for eclipse code+metrics turns up http://eclipse-metrics.sourceforge.net/, which looks good.
I also recommend the eclipse-metrics plugin.
It is capable of exporting the metrics into html, and is capable of doing this from an ant task (at least according to the documentation, I have never tried it).
The plugin works even in Eclipse 3.5 fine.
Sonar seems worth to look at: http://docs.codehaus.org/display/SONAR/Installing+Sonar+in+Eclipse
Another good project is the projectusus, which shows you not only the metrics but also whether you are respecting the standards or not and gives you a hint of what should be refactored
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I am building a desktop application. Our analysis says it would be better built with a RCP. Should I use the eclipse or netbeans platform to build my application . Some of the factors to consider are
Performance
Look and Feel
Popularity among target users (developers/testers)
License (has to be some FOSS)
The application will be having things like text editor, grid views, block diagrams and graph visualizations.
I already have experience with netbeans development, but learning eclipse won't hurt. any other options would be welcome too.
I've used Eclipse to build an RCP text editors, multiple views and graph diagrams (lacking only the block diagrams you mention). The environment was pretty good as well as the support in the community for getting help (it was my first Eclipse RCP experience - nearly all my questions had been answered at one point or another in the eclipse forums. When not - I got great feedback.)
The platform was pretty lightweight and handled memory well generally speaking. Some problems that you might run into, you'll likely run into on any platform you choose.
I would look at Netbeans. Netbeans is based on Swing while Eclipse uses SWT. Sun has put a lot of effort into Netbeans over the past few years and it's quite good.
There are some tutorials on the Netbeans site for plugins and platform.
http://www.netbeans.org/kb/trails/platform.html
This of course is a bit of a religious question. You will find it debated repeatedly on the web. Here are a couple of interesting threads.
http://www.nabble.com/Choosing-Netbeans-platform-or-Eclipse-RCP-td16012394.html
http://www.javalobby.org/java/forums/t103146.html
My vote is for Netbeans. Many of its shortcomings have been corrected in the 5 and 6 releases. The community is smaller, but certainly just as helpful.
Another option is the Swing Application Framework (JSR-296) which provides a very lightweight framework for building Swing applications. It provides some of the basic plumbing such as an Application context to share data and basic status and worker components. It doesn't provide any complex components, so it may be too lightweight for what you need.
I suggest using Eclipse RCP, as far as I can see, it has many useful aspects like action and command mechanism, Eclipse Forms, data binding, etc. You can use GEF and Zest for graph based visualization and visual editors. Also Window builder is a convenient choice for drag and drop ui creation. Also there are many sources for learning Eclipse4 RCP, vogella.de is a good starting point. cheers...
Eclipse RCP is powerfull. I have used it for one of my projects. Yes It has some bugs but it has lots of documents and it is faster than Netbeans RCP I think.
Do you have to choose only between Eclipse and Netbeans?
I heard Spring is good
Eclipse has bugs especialy with the text editors. Netbeans on the other hand sucks RAM worse that Crysis
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The people writing the user manual are not necessarily programmers, and they need a visual editor. A major issue is the internal format of the authoring tool; it should be readable text/html, so it's easy to compare versions of individual pages checked into version control.
DocBook
(source: docbook.org)
Microsoft HTML Help Workshop can be used to create good quality professional CHM help files. All you need is a bunch of HTML files. The tool "compiles" all these and bundles into a single Help file.
The HTML files can be generated using Microsoft Word/Frontpage or even Dreamweaver. You might want to consider source controlling these HTML files.
Latex. Lyx provides WYSIWYM for writing latex files.
At my old job they used a tool by madcap software called flare.
It seemed to work really well.
There are other professional products which allow help file writing and they have support of "context ID" which makes context sensitive help possible. Doc To Help and RoboHelp are these type of products.
A good combination to consider is Subversion, DocBook and Publican.
Version control = Subversion
Content Authoring = DocBook
Publishing = Publican
Optional WYSIWYG = Serna
At the moment, this is one of the toolchains in use by the world's largest provider of open source solutions, and the name behind much of the world's use of Linux-based operation systems in the enterprise market. Most (and close to all) of Red Hat's official documentation is created in such a manner. Same goes for Fedora.
The major "pro" here is that these are freely available tools, with a strong overlap in the market of technical writers. All of which will be able to (but might not want to) write in XML, and picking up DocBook is like picking up HTML in the 90's. Subversion is a very common version control tool, that like DocBook is relatively easy to implement and use. Publican is a great publishing tool that can take DocBook XML, and publish it to PDF, HTML, HTML-single, etc. Obviously your writers can use a WYSIWYG like Serna, but I use snippets in Geany (on Fedora) or TextMate (on OS X) personally.
The major "con" is the perception of technicality. Your writers might want WYSIWYG (and can have it), and depending on your documentation needs, this might be what you end up using. As you would know, there's a market out there for "Technical Writers" who specialize in fixing Microsoft Word styles (and markup), so the arguments for separating "authoring" from "publishing" are based on proven but distinct use cases for organizations that require documentation to be held up to the same standards of the engineering/programming/source production.
Some of the extreme advice you will get comes from people and companies that have been exposed to the value of XML documentation, and especially those in the realms of DITA, where certain multi-nationals have a reputation for acquisitions that are influenced by the format and availability of the product knowledge. there are also the arguments that locking your documentation into a "sticky" or closed format doesn't help the future maintenance requirements. This is where the open source options gain support on a corporate level. Plus, obviously, it's free.
You can use Subversion and MGTEK Help Producer. Help Producer makes help files from Word documents. TortoiseSVN comes with scripts to compare different revisions of Word documents, in Word itself (Word has a version compare tool).
Your users are going to want a visual diff tool that resembles the one they are editing in. If they are just slightly not-technical, DocBook or Latex aren't going to work (I've tried giving my users both, and I even tried Epic Editor as a DocBook editor which is very expensive but didn't work out very well after all). Sticking to something they know (Word) will prevent you many headaches.
I was very reluctant to go this route at first too, because I wanted a solution that was more 'technically perfect', but I realized over time that having happy and productive users was more important. Just saying that I know where you're coming from, but try the Word route - it works much better in practice than all the 'pure' text-based solutions that are out there. Regular users don't like markup based editing.
If you're using Visual Studio, take a look at SandCastle - http://www.codeplex.com/Sandcastle.
There's also a couple of tools that help you build sandcastle files, try searching "sandcastle" on codeplex. One of them is SandCastle Help File Builder (http://www.codeplex.com/SHFB), but I've never used it so I don't know if non-technical users will be happy with that.
Mapcap Flare is the best commercial tool around. Written by the ex-developers of Robodoc
I created a documentation system called Mandown (Markdown/Html/Javascript/file-based relatively linked documents for portability) which would easily go under version control. The visual editor part you would have to figure out separately - I sometimes use HTML-Kit which at least has a preview feature.
See What is the best way to store software documentation?
Here's another tool to check out: Xilize
We are using APT. It integrates well with the CI (standard build artifact) and is more alive than for instance word document. It is also possible to generate PDFs and other formats when needed.
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I am looking for a program to make mockup screenshots with. I first found out I could do it with Visual Basic (uglier names I have yet to hear a programming language being called) from joelonsoftware.com. I don't want to start learning VB now, especially since I am still in the process of learning Java. I then found mockupscreens.com, with the searchstring "how to make mockup screenshots". But seeing as I am going to use this program quite infrequently, I don't think paying $80 for it is worth it.
The mockups I'd like to do would be mainly for Windows XP (perhaps also for GNOME, KDE and Mac OSX, but these are not top-priority).
Edit: Balsamiq is suggested, but this is also a non-free program.
Balsamiq
Visio works well, if you have it.
Personally, I like paper and a pen. Then I can't get bogged down in the LOOK of it, and go more for the usability and function. Same with websites.
Once you have the form infront of a customer, you have zero room to move - it you dont deliver it pixel-perfect, they get..... angry. :)
You don't have to learn the language to use the visual forms designer from Visual Studio to create mockups. Furthermore, the Express Edition of Visual Studio is freely available in several languages, namely VB, C# and C++. Take your pick. All ship with the same forms designer that generates backend code in one of the languages. But if you only need the designer, the code might not be relevant for you.
Microsoft Visio used to come with a template containing common Windows UI elements for this purpose. I don't know if it still does.
Jeff Attwood posted about this on CodingHorror - where he mentions Powerpoint prototyping
pen and paper, or if possible, whiteboard. Once you have something you personally think could work I'd go for as rough a computerized model as you can so you don't spend time agreeing font size before the workflow etc is done. The tool I have used here is my visual designer of Visual Studio (it doesn't look too good with screenshots, only good enough to convey what you'd like to build).
Pencil (runs within firefox)
As suggested, C# Express would be well for this, as like VB, it has a GUI designer, but it is also syntactically similar to Java, so - given what you are trying to learn and do with this, it might be a nice fit.
There is a pretty exhaustive list here:
http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?GuiPrototypingTools
Important point is whether the tool has "black&white" (or "hand-drawn") skin for your mockups, as already commented by others. Many of the tools (including my own, MockupScreens) do.
wxGlade would work as well, plus it's free software.
http://balsamiq.com/ was already mentioned, but I want to explain why I like it.
It will allow you to sketch up a screenshot, and it still looks like a pen and paper version, or a whiteboard discussion.
If you get to detailed on your screenshot, then the customer thinks you are "done" and does not understand whats taking you so long to finish the project. So this "sketchyness" serves as another layer of abstraction.
MockupUI is another one, but its mockups don't look like hand-drawn. They look like the real thing and with real data. It lets you draw wireframes as well as native widgets inheriting their appearance from your OS configuration (aka Windows visual style).
About high-fidelity mockups: The risk that a customer thinks that it's "already done" is minimal as long as you do your mockups during the design specification phase of your project (that's before starting to code). On the contrary, a sketch may be too abstract for the customer to digest, unless he is a software designer too. Sketches are for developers not customers.
Wireframes (or sketches) and mockups are not the same thing and they have different uses. One is to explain functionality, the other is a representation of what the product will look like. Check out Yisela's post about the difference between wireframes and mockups.
Your question was about mockup screenshot software, but you ended-up buying a pretty powerful wireframing software.