For you developers out there, check this out: Code Bubbles.

And you really need to watch it full-screen, high def, as it’s hard to understand what they’re talking about without being able to see the text they’re editing.

Present development IDE’s are all about text files… you are organized based upon the way the data is stored. I recall long ago thinking about how that, well, sucked. 🙂  It’s one way to organize things for sure, but why should we be limited by the storage constraints of the system if that’s not the best way to actually organize and access the data? We should be able to abstract that notion away. Isn’t that part of what computers are all about?

I really like how this “code bubble” approach works to allow you to focus on work. The data is just the data. You work with the data. You can see how the data relates to other data. If you need to add your own data, like a flag or a note, you can do that. How you can preserve data that is generated, such as a debug session, and then come back and revisit that at another time be it just starting a second debug session or something you did weeks ago. How documentation, how bug reporting, how annotations are just integrated into the system and so you can hook all of these things together to allow you to work on a problem with all the necessary parts just right there and connected together. Then how you can take all of this and serialize it to share with a colleague?  That’s pretty cool.

I will say, some of the bubbles are a little annoying, mostly because I think the left-to-right hierarchical structure is a bit cumbersome on screen. But that’s a minor nit, and they’ve actually done a fair job at trying to address a lot of that mundane usability minutia. The concepts here are really good, and I figure all it takes is time in use to actually develop and truly refine the workflow. Bubbles may not be the final solution to improving the developer workflow, but it’s great to see someone working to develop a model that rethinks the whole process and strives to improve upon our existing paradigms.

Neat idea.