Code Bubbles is a front end to Eclipse designed to simplify programming by making it easy for the programmer to define and use working sets. Working sets here consist of the group of functions, documentation, notes, and other information that a programmer needs to accomplish a particular programming task such as adding a feature or fixing a bug.
Code Bubbles accomplishes this by providing compact function-based views of the code (all backed by the underlying files) that are displayed in bubbles and that are easily moved around and manipulated on the screen. The bubbles are fully editable. A large bubble area lets the programmer set up different working sets simultaneously and easily move between them.
In addition to providing facilities for editing and understanding code, the Code Bubbles front end provides facilities for debugging and testing programs. New features are always under development.
Code bubbles can be obtained from http://www.cs.brown.edu/people/spr/bubbles/bubbles.jar (or for a version that doesn't change as often but will probably be buggier, , http://www.cs.brown.edu/people/spr/bubbles.ext/bubbles.jar).
SImply download this jar file and double click on it to start its execution. Before you start, you should be familiar with Eclipse and have an Eclipse workspace and project previously set up (for now).
Instructions for installing and setting up the system can be found here.
A set of instructions for starting out with Code Bubbles can be found here. A preliminary help video for Code Bubbles is also available here.
We are working on developing a more comprehensive set of instructions, a users manual, and on-line help, but aren't quite there yet.
If you have questions, you can send email to Steve Reiss. If you have bugs to report of features to request or other information, you can use the bug-reporting system tied to Code Bubbles. Simply click on the trac-bugs button in the upper right hand corner.
Documentation, while limited, is becoming available on our wiki. In particular you might want to look at the mouse usage and the key bindings.
Documentation in Romanian (particularly a transation of this page) can be found here (courtesy of azoft).
A code bubble tutorial is currently under development.
Code Bubbles is now an open-source project. If you are interested in working on the code and having your changes be incorporated into the current binary, you should contact Steve Reiss.
Code Bubbles is available on SourceForge.
The Code Bubbles bug site is here.
"Code Bubbles: A Working Set-based Interface for Code Understanding and Maintenance", by Andrew Bragdon, Robert Zeleznik, Steven Reiss, Suman Karumuri, William Chang, Joshua Kaplan, Christopher Coleman, Ferdi Adeputra, and Joseph LaViola, Jr. (CHI 2010)
"Code Bubbles: Rethinking the User Interface Paradigm of Integrated Development Environments", by Andrew Bragdon, Steven Reiss, Robert Zeleznik, Suman Karumuri, William Chang, Joshua Kaplan, Christopher Coleman, Ferdi Adeputra, and Joseph LaViola, Jr (ICSE 2010)
Microsoft has implemented the code bubbles framework as part of visual studio for debugging. Details are available here.
