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Code Bubbles
Rethinking the User Interface Paradigm of Integrated Development Environments

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News: We will be making some Code Bubbles Beta initial announcements on Twitter very soon. Follow AndrewBragdon on Twitter

Overview
Developers spend significant time reading and navigating code fragments spread across multiple locations. The file-based nature of contemporary IDEs makes it prohibitively difficult to create and maintain a simultaneous view of such fragments. We propose a novel user interface metaphor for code understanding and maintanence based on collections of lightweight, editable fragments called bubbles, which form concurrently visible working sets.

The essential goal of this project is to make it easier for developers to see many fragments of code (or other information) at once without having to navigate back and forth. Each of these fragments is shown in a bubble.

A bubble is a fully editable and interactive view of a fragment such as a method or collection of member variables. Bubbles, in contrast to windows, have minimal border decoration, avoid clipping their contents by using automatic code reflow and elision, and do not overlap but instead push each other out of the way. Bubbles exist in a large, pannable 2-D virtual space where a cluster of bubbles comprises a concurrently visible working set. Bubbles support a lightweight grouping mechanism, and further support connections between them.

A quantitative user study indicates that Code Bubbles increased performance significantly for two controlled code understanding tasks. A qualitative user study with 23 professional developers indicates substantial interest and enthusiasm for the approach, despite the radical departure from what developers are used to.

Read more in the detail section, or sign up to participate in the beta!





Code Bubbles
  Overview + Video
  Details
  Publications
  Code Bubbles Updates
     *Updated 4/16/2011*
  Funding
  FAQ

Publications

  Venue Paper/Note PDF Video DL
Code Bubbles: Rethinking the User Interface Paradigm of Integrated Development Environments. Andrew Bragdon, Steven P. Reiss, Robert Zeleznik, Suman Karumuri, William Cheung, Joshua Kaplan, Christopher Coleman, Ferdi Adeputra, and Joseph J. LaViola Jr. To appear in: Proceedings of the 32nd International Conference on Software Engineering (2010). ICSE Paper May, 2010
Code Bubbles: A Working Set-based Interface for Code Understanding and Maintanence. Andrew Bragdon, Robert Zeleznik, Steven P. Reiss, Suman Karumuri, William Cheung, Joshua Kaplan, Christopher Coleman, Ferdi Adeputra, and Joseph J. LaViola Jr. To appear in: Proceedings of the 28th International Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (2010). CHI Paper April, 2010

Formal Demos

  Venue PDF IMG DL
Code Bubbles Research Demonstration. Andrew Bragdon, Steven P. Reiss, Robert Zeleznik, Suman Karumuri, William Cheung, Joshua Kaplan, Christopher Coleman, Ferdi Adeputra, and Joseph J. LaViola Jr. To Appear In: ICSE 2010 Research Demonstrations. ICSE May, 2010


















   
  
 











































































































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