hey there,
today zombiecalypse and I are going to introduce SCodeBubbles the Code Bubbles for Smalltalk.
Now many of you may ask what exactly Code Bubbles are – most have never heard of something like that.
Code Bubbles aren’t very popular at the moment but it’s brand new and has potential once it lifts off.
Andrew Bragdon from the Brown University recently published his work about Java Code Bubbles. If you like to see what Java Code Bubbles are and how these Bubbles could look like watch the following screencast video from Andrew Bragdon.

As you could see Code Bubbles will provide developers a nice way to navigate through code and codefragments whereas every class or codefragment is represented by a bubble. As a result the user don’t need as much time to navigate back and forth through classes and projects. These bubbles do have special behavior, bubbles

• do not overlap, they push eachother out of the way intelligent
• can be sticked together and separated
• can be linked (to see which method/message belongs to which class and so on)
• have the ability to fold-out and as a result if they aren’t fold-out they do not use much space

The last feature is something Andrew Bragdon’s Code Bubbles don’t have but zombiecalypse and I came up with this idea to save space on the screen and make it easier to overview. Because we are working with Smalltalk we can use the power of the debugger for a lot of things like “self” and there could also be a debugger-bubble but this are things we can’t definitive say at the moment. In order to make the transition not too harsh, it will be possible to put all kind of morphs into bubbles, for example the normal windows.

To go on with we are not only going to change the look of code and fragments, we also like to change the look of the world interface too.
Like you have already seen in the video above we also want to implement an infinite virtual workspace with a zoom in and out function and if possible a map to navigate around. Such a 2D-world could be useful for software cartography as example and you could save our projects anywhere on the world(map).

For more informations please visite either SCodeBubbles (will be updated soon) or SqueakSource, on this pages will be the recent updates and versions. Another way to get more informations is to follow @SCodeBubbles on Twitter!

Currently we are just at the begin of this big project but we are excited about SCodeBubbles and we can’t wait to really get into it and we are going to publish exact details about our project soon.

Stay tuned!

cheers zombiecalypse and d3orn