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vazexqi / CodingSpectator

Watches and analyzes code edits in the Eclipse IDE non-invasively
http://codingspectator.cs.illinois.edu
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Inform users about the presence of CodingSpectator #251

Closed reprogrammer closed 13 years ago

reprogrammer commented 13 years ago

Some of our participants can only use CodingSpectator on certain public projects. So, it would be good to prevent users from accidentally using CodingSpectator on private projects.

CodingSpectator prompts the user before submitting data to our servers at UIUC. However, I believe users who choose to save their CodingSpectator passwords in Eclipse secure storage, won't get prompted.

Ralph suggested to provide an easy way for the participants to tell if CodingSpectator is activated on their workspace. Currently, participants can tell the presence of CodingSpectator by going to the preferences of Eclipse. But, I agree with Ralph that it would be nice to inform the participant about the presence of CodingSpectator more easily. There are different way to signal the presence of CodingSpectator, e.g. changing the splash screen, popping up a dialog at the start up of Eclipse and showing and adding a button to the toolbar. I think it would be nice to inform the user about the presence of Eclipse both at the start up and in the workbench.

reprogrammer commented 13 years ago

According to http://www.eclipse.org/articles/Article-Branding/branding-your-application.html and http://www.eclipse.org/articles/product-guide/guide.html, we can do branding in Eclipse and change several visual elements of Eclipse such as the splash screen, window image and about dialog. For an example, see the EMF branding plug-in.

reprogrammer commented 13 years ago

@vazexqi, @Wanderer777: 98bb9e74bf82ff2375855c325a17c2ca7111dcfc adds the word "CodingSpectator" to the status line of Eclipse. The next step is to replace the text by an icon with a tooltip.

reprogrammer commented 13 years ago

I suggest that we replace the word "CodingSpectator" in the status line by the logo of the university with a tool tip that says "CodingSpectator is active."

reprogrammer commented 13 years ago

It's reasonable to show CodingSpectator in the status line by default. But, it would be nice to allow users to remove it from the status line. We could add a check box to the preferences page of CodingSpectator to show/hide CodingSpectator in the status line.

reprogrammer commented 13 years ago

I verified that the automatic check for updates to CodingSpectator works on Helios, Indigo and SDK.