

My Startup: A Different Take on UML - What do you think? - vineet
http://blog.architexa.com/2010/05/different-take-on-uml-a-sneak-preview/

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Maro
When you're modifying stuff in the video, a dialog with a progress bar pops up
for a split-second, but since the task finishes very quickly is disappears so
quickly I feel it's unnecessary. Maybe move the progess bar to the status bar
to avoid this annoyance.

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abhirakshit
Hey Maro,

Good point! We have been debating this. As the resource was small in the shown
case the dialog just popped up for a split second. The reason why we have it
is because nothing else can be done when processing is happening and if the
resource is large it takes a little longer to process, so it makes sense to
have a dialog there for that period. Any suggestions about how it can be made
better are welcome.

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mullr
Perhaps a small progress bar embedded in the element you activated? For the
first example in the video, double clicking 'lapis' would show a small
progress bar embedded in the bottom of that element itself. That would
indicate that it has reacted to the user action, which is what's important.
You could even do a safari-type thing and make the whole element into a
progress bar.

Clicking the item again while it's still processing could bring up the dialog
for more detail, or to let the user cancel the operation if it's taking too
long. If long running operations don't actually happen, you could do away with
the progress display altogether and just use a throbber. But they probably do
happen.

If your engine can deal with it, this design also affords doing operations in
parallel. If not, then you could queue up commands as they're performed.

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vineet
mullr, Thanks for the comment. We definitely want to investigate such ideas.

So far we have been mostly focusing on the 'big picture' ideas, but will be
working on improving such details as we get time.

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durbin
Can this be used with other languages or only Java?

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vineet
We have designed it in mind to easily add other languages. Currently their is
a prototype for C++ built, but we want to do a really good job for one group
of people (Java currently).

What language(s) would you like support for?

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DanielRibeiro
Ruby would be great as well, even though Eclipse's ruby support is not the
best among IDEs. Maybe this could encourage this situation to change it.

Not sure if you already implemented it, but from the video it feels you click
a lot when navigating through the uml graphs. Showing all nodes on the uml
graph within a distance of 2 or 3 (depending on the ammount of nodes) would
make it less _clicky_. Not to mention that a node on its own not really
useful.

Grats on the very nice tool.

~~~
sethrq
Ruby support may be implemented down the road depending on customer demand.

Many UML tools add too much info automatically, we have a number of features
that allow users to add the nodes they care about with a single context menu
click: Show Super/Subtype Hierarchy, show Extending/Extended Classes, and show
referencing types / methods.

