Code Bubbles mdash; Rethinking the IDE's User Interface

kang327 writes "As Java developers we are used to the familiar file-based user interface that is used by all of the major IDEs. A team at Brown University has developed an IDE for Java called Code Bubbles that makes a fairly radical departure from current IDEs mdash; it is based on fragments instead of files. The idea is that you can see many different pieces of code at once. Fragments can form groups, have automatic layout assistance, wrap long lines based on syntax, and exist in a virtual workspace that you can pan. A video shows reading and editing code, opening different kinds of info such as Javadocs, bug reports and notes, annotating and sharing workspaces, and debugging with bubbles. They report on several user studies that show the system increases performance for the tasks studied, and also that professional developers were enthusiastic about using it. There is also a Beta that you can sign up for."pa href="http://developers.slashdot.org/story/10/03/10/1827244/Code-Bubbles-mdash-Rethinking-the-IDEs-User-Interface?from=rss"img src="http://developers.slashdot.org/slashdot-it.pl?from=rssamp;op=imageamp;style=h0amp;sid=10/03/10/1827244"/aa href="http://www.facebook.com/sharer.php?u=http%3A%2F%2Fdevelopers.slashdot.org% 2Fstory%2F10%2F03%2F10%2F1827244%2FCode-Bubbles-mdash-Rethinking-the-IDEs-User-Interface" target="_blank" title="Share on Facebook"img src="http://a.fsdn.com/sd/facebook_icon_large.png"/a a href="http://twitter.com/home?status=Code+Bubbles+%26mdash%3B+Rethinking+th e+IDE's+User+Interface%3A+http%3A%2F%2Fbit.ly%2F95 y5AG" target="_blank" title="Share on Twitter"img src="http://a.fsdn.com/sd/twitter_icon_large.png"/a/ppa href="http://developers.slashdot.org/story/10/03/10/1827244/Code-Bubbles-mdash-Rethinking-the-IDEs-User-Interface?from=rss"Read more of this story/a at Slashdot./p pa href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/aMbXUKyveVlHdVHPLg9ECXyF66Y/0/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/aMbXUKyveVlHdVHPLg9ECXyF66Y/0/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/abr/ a href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/aMbXUKyveVlHdVHPLg9ECXyF66Y/1/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/aMbXUKyveVlHdVHPLg9ECXyF66Y/1/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/pimg src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Slashdot/slashdotDevelopers/~4/iAygeULcj84" height="1" width="1"/

More...