Here are some ideas for the initial UI of Durham's Quick Edit Perspective. For a first run, minimum functionality is the most important -- something we can get comments on and iterate over. For now I just need something that works so that I can hook up all of the backend stuff dealing with the metadata itself. Here's the basic look again, copied from last week:

The File List view will just be a JFace ListViewer. The user adds one or more files with a File Open dialog. This dialog opens from the File --> Add Files... menu item.

The Properties view is a list of the metadata properties from the file that's selected in the File List view. Only one file may be selected at a time (for now). The Properties view is tricky because depending on the file selected it may have a few metadata properties or none. A JFace TableViewer seems like the best choice for now, with columns for Property Name and Property Value.

There also has to be a way in the UI to save the properties back to the file, like an action for File --> Save Properties (ie. Ctrl-S). That seems simple enough.

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Now onto the properties themselves, which I'm working on for MP3 files. MP3 files are special because they have three different types of metadata: id3v1, id3v2 and MPEG information.

I could combine all of these properties and display them in one table in the Properties view, but that might look cluttered. Initially it might be enough to just have something like

id3v2.artistName   |   Sugar Ray

as the property columns. Later on the different types of metadata can each be on their own tab or something. Remember, there aren't advanced features in this perspective -- it's just for quick viewing and editing all different types of files, not just MP3.

Other file types that have much simpler metadata are pictures and Microsoft Office documents. Plugins could be made for these as well.