Again, projects moving towards viewing small chunks of code/data (whether method, class definition, variables in a stack frame, etc). Familiar stuff, and maybe food for thought for alternative code browsers.
http://www.andrewbragdon.com/codebubbles_site.asp
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.
Hilarious. Decades of reading whines from people about how they want to be able to edit Smalltalk code in emacs or other insane editors and now the dead-code-in-files people want to have method browsers - and they think it's a novel idea.
/tim {insert witticism here}
Although not obvious from a first visual impression, this is more recent:
http://cs.brown.edu/~spr/codebubbles/
And here is the code:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/codebubbles/
Best, Marcel
-- View this message in context: http://forum.world.st/Code-bubbles-a-prototype-IDE-tp4775442p4775446.html Sent from the Squeak - Dev mailing list archive at Nabble.com.
And most of the development team went to Microsoft and implemented DebuggerCanvas for Visual Studio:
http://visualstudiogallery.msdn.microsoft.com/4a979842-b9aa-4adf-bfef-83bd42...
Best, Marcel
-- View this message in context: http://forum.world.st/Code-bubbles-a-prototype-IDE-tp4775442p4775447.html Sent from the Squeak - Dev mailing list archive at Nabble.com.
If I remember, I'll try out the DebuggerCanvas next week. Annoyingly it requires the enormously expensive Ultimate edition.
Now you _can_ look at these kinds of developments and cry into one's sandwich that one's been saying all this for only 30 years, or one can realise that it usually takes 30 years for ideas to actually start being applied. More importantly, we can take inspiration from the new forms of mutations, and improve our own stuff, if applicable.
frank
On 30 August 2014 11:39, Marcel Taeumel marcel.taeumel@student.hpi.uni-potsdam.de wrote:
And most of the development team went to Microsoft and implemented DebuggerCanvas for Visual Studio:
http://visualstudiogallery.msdn.microsoft.com/4a979842-b9aa-4adf-bfef-83bd42...
Best, Marcel
-- View this message in context: http://forum.world.st/Code-bubbles-a-prototype-IDE-tp4775442p4775447.html Sent from the Squeak - Dev mailing list archive at Nabble.com.
Frank Shearar-3 wrote
one can realise that it usually takes 30 years for ideas to actually start being applied
+100. Very insightful and powerful. This is just the way the new ideas work. Alan Kay said something that I'll have to paraphrase because I can't find the quote that the stages of acceptance of a blue plane idea - first they laugh at it, then they get angry, and then they say it was their idea the whole time.
----- Cheers, Sean -- View this message in context: http://forum.world.st/Code-bubbles-a-prototype-IDE-tp4775442p4775459.html Sent from the Squeak - Dev mailing list archive at Nabble.com.
On Sat, Aug 30, 2014 at 8:42 AM, Sean P. DeNigris sean@clipperadams.com wrote:
Frank Shearar-3 wrote
one can realise that it usually takes 30 years for ideas to actually start being applied
+100. Very insightful and powerful. This is just the way the new ideas work.
-100. This is not a new idea, and the way they implemented it is not powerful because the amount of screen real-estate consumed makes it cumbersome and leads to information overload.
In fact, many years ago, I tried doing exactly this in Squeak for a couple of days. SystemWindows are just Morphs, and the Connectors package allows any Morphs to be connected. I made something where spawning additional browsers would connect to the browser they spawned from. It was "neato" at first but, as I said, usability and productivity was not there because it took up a lot of screen space and was cumbersome.
The beautiful thing about Squeak is how it achieves most or all of the *use-cases* presented in the video in much simpler and efficient ways. To wit, the whole goal of Code Bubbles is the same goal of the Tracing Messages Browser, except the TMB is like a Ferrari where Code Bubbles is more like pretty flowers -- nice to look at but not letting the developer "go fast" because of the real-estate issue. TMB presents *Traces* (e.g., just the method names without the code), so I can have 10 separate Traces on the screen, (e.g., 10 windows) but you ain't gonna do that with Code Bubbles.. :)
Another thing I do often is duplicate browsers to set them off to the side, or change the browser color to red (via its window menu) to indicate a "Bug" needing fixed in that browser.. Sure, I don't have a the pretty giant lady-bug icon but, functionally, its just as useful.
Squeak leverages the power of TSTTCPW to the max, that's what I love about it.
Alan Kay said something that I'll have to paraphrase because I can't find the quote that the stages of acceptance of a blue plane idea - first they laugh at it, then they get angry, and then they say it was their idea the whole time.
Alan would never consider Code Bubbles a blue-plane idea...
Chris Muller-3 wrote
On Sat, Aug 30, 2014 at 8:42 AM, Sean P. DeNigris <
sean@
> wrote:
Frank Shearar-3 wrote
one can realise that it usually takes 30 years for ideas to actually start being applied
+100. Very insightful and powerful. This is just the way the new ideas work.
-100. This is not a new idea, and... Alan would never consider Code Bubbles a blue-plane idea...
Let's recap... Frank suggested that instead of being jealous that people are (perhaps badly) reinventing/implementing ideas that some of us have known about for decades, that we realize that this is exactly how adoption of blue plane ideas (e.g the Dynabook) always look - sloppy fits and starts for 100+ years. *Frank's suggestion* (I resisted making that all caps ;)) was the insightful and powerful idea. It gets us nowhere to yell into a volcano. And I think we can let Alan speak for himself.
----- Cheers, Sean -- View this message in context: http://forum.world.st/Code-bubbles-a-prototype-IDE-tp4775442p4775508.html Sent from the Squeak - Dev mailing list archive at Nabble.com.
Another funny thing: The way the Code Bubbles auto-size reminds me of my Smart Splitters, which I love. :-)
On Sat, Aug 30, 2014 at 8:42 AM, Sean P. DeNigris sean@clipperadams.com wrote:
Frank Shearar-3 wrote
one can realise that it usually takes 30 years for ideas to actually start being applied
+100. Very insightful and powerful. This is just the way the new ideas work. Alan Kay said something that I'll have to paraphrase because I can't find the quote that the stages of acceptance of a blue plane idea - first they laugh at it, then they get angry, and then they say it was their idea the whole time.
Cheers, Sean -- View this message in context: http://forum.world.st/Code-bubbles-a-prototype-IDE-tp4775442p4775459.html Sent from the Squeak - Dev mailing list archive at Nabble.com.
The Code Bubbles UI is not file-centric anymore. Fine, just like in Smalltalk tools. But for the rest, there are not many similarities. If you compare those *bubbles* against Smalltalk System Browser windows, the bubbles just win considering screen real estate. :)
Could you elaborate on other things in Code Bubbles that you would credit Smalltalk environments for being the first who did it? :)
Best, Marcel
-- View this message in context: http://forum.world.st/Code-bubbles-a-prototype-IDE-tp4775442p4775763.html Sent from the Squeak - Dev mailing list archive at Nabble.com.
On 2 September 2014 13:33, Marcel Taeumel marcel.taeumel@student.hpi.uni-potsdam.de wrote:
The Code Bubbles UI is not file-centric anymore. Fine, just like in Smalltalk tools. But for the rest, there are not many similarities. If you compare those *bubbles* against Smalltalk System Browser windows, the bubbles just win considering screen real estate. :)
Could you elaborate on other things in Code Bubbles that you would credit Smalltalk environments for being the first who did it? :)
I don't particularly care who did things first. What I care about is stealing shiny baubles from people who've done the hard work of thinking things through. And so I raised the topic here so that those who know better than me can pick through the bits and let us know which parts are worth stealing.
frank
Best, Marcel
Where do these bubbles come from?
Best, Marcel
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