Eclipse Mylar 1.0 ready to download

Well, of course the really big news for today is that Java 6 has been released. However, since the whole world is blogging about that and I already wrote some stories about it before, I'll just focus on another important release for today: Mylar (though I already wrote about that before too)!

Mylar is a plug-in for Eclipse based developer tools and is best described as a task-oriented developer aid. It provides a task-interface to store local tasks or an advanced UI for task repositories like Bugzilla, Trac, JIRA or your own web-based bug tracking tool (using HTML scraping). Think clickable stack traces and bug IDs, duplicate bug detection, off-line task management, pop-up notifications on new tasks, etc. Very cool stuff.

Next, you can select which tasks you are working on, and while you work Mylar automatically detects what you find interesting, based on what you look at and where you type. It automatically hides all the other uninteresting stuff, giving you a nice focused view on what you are doing, without scrolling past hundreds of methods, classes, files and directories. You have to use this feature to really see what this means, it is very intuitive, very easy and really powerful. This is the best new developer feature I have seen since the invention of Ctrl+space. 😉

Mylar is available for Java 5/Eclipse 3.2 and higher. Since all the major Eclipse based IDEs (IBM, BEA, Borland) latest tools are also Eclipse 3.2 based this means a pretty big audience when these tools will receive market adoption. To see the tool in action, see this webinar, and skip to the demos (use the little button with the blue arrow, bottom-left to bring up a menu to skip). But if you really want to know what Mylar is about, just install it and work with it for 15 minutes. You will not be disappointed!