Thursday, March 27, 2008

New Look for the Palette

Way back in March 2006, the visual design team at IBM started working on a new UI for the palette. Well it has taken a while and some refresh to the design, but the Eclipse modeling team at IBM has finally implemented a new palette.

A shot of the Palette view for the GMF logic example:
The new palette includes:
  • New color treatment for drawers: Closed, expanded and hover.
  • New color treatment for groups and tools: white background, mouse hover and selected.
  • New color treatment for stacks: white background, mouse hover and selected.
  • New Pin in and Pin out icons.
  • New Palette icon.
  • New dock and expanded look.
  • Drawer icon optional.
  • Toolbar group (the top tool group above is in icon mode: selection tool, zoom in, zoom out, notes stack).
  • A completely new look for stack, including flyouts and pinned stack (above shows the Rectangle Types stack pinned).
Cherie has already committed most of her work and is finishing up the stack work for GEF 3.4 M6.

Best part of the new palette is that there are no API changes, all GEF (and GMF) clients get a new modern look for free.

Feel free to bang away and raise any Bugzillas on us if you find any issues.