Upgrading to Eclipse 4.2 (Juno)

Last updated on 2014-09-07

I have delayed this upgrade for some time for no specific reason, and decided to give it a try, and was encouraged to do it when I saw that the eclipse “download” link takes you directly to eclipse 4.2 and not to older versions. So the release must be fairly usable at the least.

Firs impression – UGLY!!!

Who decided to re-design the user interface to look this ugly? But wait, the user interface has a theme and can be modified (this is the “Windows7” Theme). Changed to classic…

Sill UGLY! The color scheme is way off. I mean, look at the nice blue title bar (same as old eclipse) and then at the pastel, blue toolbar color with the white line on top. What is this guys? and the tabs, which are in some tone of pastel light aquamarine or something like that.

OK, so colors are bad. What’s next? ah, the beautiful error in the task list. “Could not create the view”??? This is bad. Just out of the box, in a clean workspace, things should look better.

Maybe Juno is not so ready after all. I’ll give it a try for a couple of days in hope of a better experience. But the first impression is not good. And there is never a second time to make a first impression.

Update: The ugly classical theme I saw is caused by a bug of the platform. After restart, eclipse looks just like in old times. Seems some widgets can’t be modified at runtime and the platform must be restarted for the changes to work. So what is the solution to the bug? warn the user that he must restart the workbench for the changes to apply. Long live the restart button.

Update2: since I loaded a plain java developer IDE, I have to install many plugins. The old install window was very slow, fetching available packages normally took a lot of time, and filtering was very slow, even when the number of elements in the list is relatively small. But now things are working very fast! fetching available packages took just a couple of seconds, and filtering was almost automatic. Thanks guys.