Code bubbles: rethinking the user interface paradigm of integrated development environments
Abstract
Today's integrated development environments (IDEs) are hampered by their dependence on files and file-based editing. We propose a novel user interface that is based on collections of lightweight editable fragments, called bubbles, which when grouped together form concurrently visible working sets. In this paper we describe the design of a prototype IDE user interface for Java based on working sets. A quantitative evaluation shows that developers could expect to view a sizeable number of functions concurrently with relatively few UI operations. A qualitative user evaluation with 23 professional developers indicates a high level of excitement, interest, and potential benefits and uses.
BibTeX
@inproceedings{Bragdon-al:ICSE10,
author = {Andrew Bragdon and
Steven P. Reiss and
Robert C. Zeleznik and
Suman Karumuri and
William Cheung and
Joshua Kaplan and
Christopher Coleman and
Ferdi Adeputra and
Joseph J. LaViola Jr.},
title = {Code bubbles: rethinking the user interface paradigm of integrated development environments},
booktitle = {ICSE (Part I)},
pages = {455--464},
publisher = {{ACM}},
year = {2010},
}