What are strategies for not making Eclipse RCP based application look like IDE?

I开发者_StackOverflow中文版s there example for Eclipse RCP based application that doesn't look like engineering tool, but rather more friendly to a regular user, so I could learn from it (open source preferred)?

A great example of what is possible with Eclipse RCP is Lotus Notes 8:

• Lotus Notes gets a facelift
• Why choosing eclipse for notes 8 was the right choice

I am not sure how they adapted the UI but assume they used the Presentation API and did some manual SWT work.

You might be interested in Eclipse Riena. From the project page:

...the Riena user interface components will support a business process oriented user interface visualization and navigation metaphor which can be used as alternative to the default workbench layout.

You probably want ot take a look at the following two presentations:

• “RCP Custom Look and Feel” - http://wiki.eclipse.org/index.php/RCP_Custom_Look_and_Feel - from the Eclipse Wiki will give you a good starting point to some of the possible strategies. It does not cover all strategies - e.g. theming and e4...
• “Changing the look and feel of Eclipse applications” - download : http://dev.eclipse.org/viewcvs/viewvc.cgi/org.eclipse.ui.examples.presentation/eclipsecon2005-presentationsAPI.ppt?revision=1.1&view=co - a presentation from EclipseCon 2005 that describes the basic ideas behind the Presentation API. Note though that the only real way to create a new presentation, is to clone one of the existing ones and and then start modifying the code.

If you want to use CSS styling, when consider using Eclipse 4 (often dupped e4) as the basis for your application. Here you have a very large degree of freedom!

Good luck!