Monday March 05, 2007 Seapegasus Blog
Monday March 05, 2007 Too Many Plugins, Too Many Places?
Did you notice? Jiri Kovalsky mentioned a soon-to-come web form to upload NetBeans modules to the update center. :-) :-) Llisten to Tinu's PodCast, it's about in the middle. It ties in well with this interesting thread on nbusers, [nbusers] too many plugins, too many places?.
Join in the discussion if you have a strong opinion about features for the perfect plugin portal; we have some interesting ideas for "ratings versus recommendations" already. The point was, in popular plugin portals (such as Firefox's), users often end up with a list of half a dozen high rated plugins with almost the same features. So you still have to read all the comments or try each of them, which costs quite some time. If there was a default recommendation, such as "this one has the minimum feature set, and is stable," people who just need the basic stuff could make their decision more quickly. And if you are the other one who needs advanced bleeding-edge features, you are probably willing to test the plugins yourself for the best fit anyway.
Well, so one proposal was the following: Of course, each member will be allowed to rate plugins. But we don't want to set up an additional official "committee" to decide which plugins get an extra "stable quality" recommendation or whatever -- we don't want to wait for the commitee's decision for each plugin before it's unblocked ot so. Instead each member should have settings in her profile where she can specify a lists of members whose opinion she trusts especially, e.g. because these fellow-members have the same usecase (use the same OS or the same Java edition or version, etc). Then the sorting mechanism could individually rank ratings by trusted fellow-members slightly higher. That way, we would get customized ratings in the case that the selection should grow to wide, and with an uncustomized profile, you'd still get the ratings in their objective order.
Alright, NetBeans is not Firefox, somehow I don't really expect, like, five complete but different UML implementations to pop up in the update center one night, and then we all sit there, "Oh my gosh, which one to choose, now I gotta test them all." ;-) But it could happen with the small and handy add-ons (syntax highlightings, local history, chats...) There are so many NBM plugins out there already, and the new portal will be a great chance to see them next to each other. I am really looking forward to this plugin catalogue update, because it's not enough that plugins exists "somehwere", they need to findable. And for that matter, sortable. And ratable. And auto-installable. And update-able! :-)
Posted by seapegasus ( Mar 05 2007, 02:30:16 PM CET ) Permalink
