What feeling do you never want to encounter in life? For me it’s Disgust! Nevertheless, I encounter it sometimes, in very special cases… for example when as a Java developer I have to work with the reflection API to fix some unthinkable problem.  As the team behind Sirius, what matters most to us is to be sure that our final users never feel this about our product. That’s why in each release we work on improving the user experience by enhancing some diagram behaviours. In the new Sirius 4.1 we focused on: Better zoom: In a diagram editor, the zoom with mouse wheel is now zooming on mouse location instead of center of the editor. Edges improvements: Straighten an edge: we have worked on some improvements on the diagram editor to offer a better experience to the end user. Sirius 4.1 comes with the possibility to straighten an edge to top, bottom, left or right. These actions are available on edge contextual menu Layout/Straighten. Display link between edge and labels: it i...

This week I am participating to EclipseCon Europe to present what’s new in Eclipse Sirius 4.1.  What I feel like on monday morning: Joy! On Monday evening I’ll be in Ludwigsburg for EclipseCon! This one is little special as it will be my first one as an official Sirius committer. I am really happy to introduce you to the new features of the 4.1 release, especially what we did to improve the specifier experience: Pre-registered service class: starting from Sirius 4.1, by default when you create a new Viewpoint Specification Project, a service class is pre-registered. Improve the selection of deeply contained Viewpoint Specification Model elements: in a style property customization, the “applied on” field was used to open a popup with all styles of the VSM. As they are identified by type and color (e.g. square blue) a lot of entries are identical, making it difficult to select the correct one. Now it is more user friendly as the mapping container of the style is also...

When I was a child one of my favorite game was Puzzle Bobble, you may remember these two little dragons Bub and Bob. What I loved in this game : simple rules, easy to play and so very addictive. This is exactly what I feel when I think about the new Properties View feature in Eclipse Sirius: The rules are really simple as it is the same as the ones existing for the other Sirius representations : define your properties in the .odesign file, it is dynamic, no code generation is involved. It is very easy to use as it follow habits of Sirius Specifier : use expression to go through the model, then it is flexible even for complex Ecore models. And it is also greatly addictive! You will start by trying it on one of your Sirius based modeler and finally you will want to use it everywhere, even on non Sirius based editors. The Properties View component exists from Sirius 4.0 but it was labeled as experimental. During the summer we worked hard on this topic and today we are glad to ann...

The team is not only polishing Sirius 4.1.0 which is planned for the end of September, but also preparing for the ultimate event for the Sirius community aka SiriusCon! We organized the first edition last year with the help of the Eclipse Fundation: a one-day free event with two tracks filled with highly specialized talks and sessions dedicated to discovery. It looks like we stroke a right balance and feedback was excellent for the first edition. It is with excitement and anticipation that we are preparing SiriusCon 2016 based on the same fundamentals: Paris An international event in one of the most beautiful city in the world: Paris. That’s a pleasure to gather in such a central venue and this makes the event really easy to come to. Strong content I’s only one day but it is filled with 30 minutes sessions: exclusive content from the Sirius team tackling subjects related to best practices, the project roadmap or integration with other technol...

UML Designer 7.0 is out. This new release is based on Eclipse Sirius 4.0 and Eclipse Neon. It provides plenty of brand new features: Bi-directional link with editor (#523) New dashboard based on the Activity Explorer from Amalgam (#827) Class diagram: represent abstract element in italic (#758) represent static element underlined (#363) view the qualified name of a class in the tooltip (#851) stabilize association class (#856, #854, #857), support N-ary association (#850, #855, #853) support qualifiers on association ends (#434) State machine diagram: orthogonal regions re-implemented by using the Sirius compartment feature (#125) Activity diagram: optional body layer (#757, #846) and some bug fixes (#865) Sequence diagram: clean & reorder the palette (#858) Use case diagram: handle non human actor (#46) All closed issues are available on https://github.com/ObeoNetwork/UML-Designer/milestones/7.0.0. Try it and download it on: http://www.umldesigner.org/download/Lien d...