Hope this saves somebody else some time :-)
With all the hoopla about MSP430ware and the fact that it's part of my CCS v5.1 installation, I thought I'd give it a try. Hmm.... how to do that? Searched the online docs (including the User Guide -- didn't find a "Getting Started" guide), searched the CCS online help, watched the short "introducing" video, saw a reference to the "TI Resource Explorer" -- no info in the CCS help on that. Sheesh! Searched this forum and the product web pages to no avail. Even tried creating a new project from the CCS File menu and looked for MSP430ware templates. Nothing. Hmm... Maybe since M4w only supports 5xxx and 6xxx devices, I need to select one of those as the target for my new project. Nada. Searched around the Window command and the Views contained there for the "TI Resource Explorer". Nope.
It was only through blind luck that I tried creating a new project again, this time through the Project menu: Project | CCS Example Projects, which lo-and-behold revealed the well-hidden TI Resource Explorer pane and a twist-down for MSP430ware. Clicking on that revealed the "easy to use GUI". Ya, sure :-)
I would strongly recommend that you:
- Create a Getting Started guide for both CCS and the stand-alone version of M4w with explicit steps.
- Make sure that "TI Resource Explorer" and "MSP430ware" have at least minimal entries in the CCS online help.
And while I'm being curmudgeonly about UIs, let me recommend an improvement for the Devices tab of the M4w GUI:
- Shading out the unselected device icons is a good idea, but they're too dark. You can't read them. Finding the one you want is akin to the blind person stumbling around and feeling the Braille signage on the wall -- you have to mouse over the icons to get a popup you can read. Make it so that all the icons are legible all the time, even if the moused-over one is brighter.
Mike (who sometimes worries about the usability of UIs :-)
