NaviActionPad

With Squareness I learned that choosing unique names helps in later finding out if and where someone mentions your creations. There are tons of pages about the squareness of web graphics that are not related to my creation.

So with the next one I got a bit more creative. Naming is one of the hardest problems in software development. It starts with the naming of classes and methods and naming products is probably the most challenging as it is really that one part everyone sees. There is a best practice to choose a product name that describes the function of a product. So I came up with “NaviActionPad”.

Today I think this is one of the most boring names that I came up with for something I created. but there you have it. It was a plugin for my favorite Java IDE IntelliJ IDEA that provided an easy way to navigate your code and execute actions on those parts of your code.

You could navigate to other methods and to classes in the same package and to other packages. And there was some basic kind of intelligence in it that provided you with the actions on those elements that made sense. So you got other actions presented when you navigated to a method than when you chose a class.

That was in 2006 and I wrote a blog post about it back then. Nowadays it’s mostly obsolete and I doubt that it would work in the current version of IDEA, but it was a fun project and my first try at a plugin for that IDE.