jducoeur

Thanks to Lambda for the pointer to this *remarkable* research project. The Code Bubbles project is a radical rethink of UI design -- specifically, an IDE that bears no resemblance to conventional IDEs. It implicitly asserts that it is silly to constrain everything to the boundaries of the visible window, and instead builds an IDE inside a very large, pannable workspace. The result is that it uses physical continuity in ways nothing today does -- in particular, it very casually lays large numbers of related blocks side-by-side, rather than requiring you to keep them in mind as you flip back and forth. There's an 8-minute video, which is well worth watching.

Very neat stuff. I'm sure that it will need further refinement, but my reaction is that they're on to something here, and that we'll see these ideas showing up in real systems soon...

Thanks to my coworker Bob Peterson for the link to this interesting little article. High concept: when designing UI elements, you tend want a moderate level of realism -- enough to get across the real world concept you are trying to relate to, but not so much as to feel like a specific real object. The article is short and sensible: worth a look if you're in the UI design space.

(I also like that he encourages UI designers to read Understanding Comics. I haven't re-read it in some years: I ought to take a look with my UI-programming hat on...)