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.

Navigating and understanding the source code of a program are highly challenging activities. This paper introduces a fisheye view of source code to a Java programming environment. The fisheye view aims to support a programmer’s navigation and understanding by displaying those parts of the source code that have the highest degree of interest given the current focus. An experiment was conducted which compared the usability of the fisheye view with a common, linear presentation of source code. Sixteen participants performed tasks significantly faster with the fisheye view, although results varied dependent on the task type. The participants generally preferred the interface with the fisheye view. We analyse participants ’ interaction with the fisheye view and suggest how to improve its performance. In the calculation of the degree of interest, we suggest to emphasize those parts of the source code that are semantically related to the programmer’s current focus.

As programs grow larger, it becomes more difficult to understand their source code in its entirety. The same is also true for working with source code, which was written by someone other than oneself. A fisheye view is a visualisation technique that displays only information in which the user is currently most interested, while omitting all uninteresting information. This paper presents an implementation of a degree of interest fisheye view of source code and the processes that lead to it, including an extension of a code folding tool for developers using Java Modeling Language. In this paper we present a comparison with other implementations of fisheye view. Also, we suggest a new approach for computing which information is interesting to the user as well as other possible ways for improving the efficiency of a fisheye view.

Previous research has found that programmers spend a significant fraction of their time navigating between different source code locations and that much of that time is spent returning to previously viewed code. Other work has identified the ability to juxtapose arbitrary pieces of code as cognitively important. However, modern IDEs have inherited a user interface design in which, usually, only one source file is displayed at a time, with the result that users must switch back and forth from one file to another. Taking advantage of the increasing availability of large displays, we propose a new interaction paradigm in which an IDE presents parts of multiple source files side by side, using the Mylyn degree-of-interest function to dynamically allocate screen space to them on the basis of degree-of-interest to the current development task. We demonstrate the feasibility of this paradigm with a prototype implementation built on the Eclipse IDE and note that it was used by the author over a period of months in the development of the prototype itself. Additionally, we present two case studies which quantify the potential reduction in navigation and demonstrate the simplicity of the approach and its ability to capture complete concerns on screen. These case studies suggest that the approach has the potential to reduce the time that programmers spend navigating by as much as 50%. ii Table of Contents Abstract................................. ii