Designing user interfaces, and especially, pixel graphics require real art skills. Eclipse UI historically had nice appearance and Mylar tool continued UI story. It had bunch of neat icons, but this time I'd like to talk about just one of them.

At the beginning (probably about 2 years ago) its main metaphor was Mylar glasses, which then been replaced into semi-transparent overlay (representing Mylar film) and just recently, after project renaming its main UI metaphor got a new look. Actually it been used in number of places in Mylar UI for long time, so it just got expanded on a new level. If you haven't guessed yet, here is a clue: it is simple, shiny and round... yes it is a ball! :-)

Anyways, this metaphor looks good from the anesthetic point of view, but it isn't really intuitive. For instance, from the neatly looking Eclipse welcome page you can't really guess what those balls are needed for, and current contribution is unfortunately missing descriptive info.

I had somehow lengthy discussion with Mik about this on one of the bug reports, but wasn't been able to convince him to change this graphics. So, we are going have those balls around for some time. :-)

_{The opinions expressed in this post are my own and not necessarily reflect those of other Mylar developers or other Eclipse committers}