Enhancing the User Experience in a Live Coding Environment

GT — the Glamorous Toolkit — is a "moldable", live development environment for Pharo Smalltalk. The environment can be easily adapted to support live development in a variety of application domains.

The goal of this project would be to explore one of several directions that would enhance the user experience within GT. Possible directions include:

  1. Developing a live tutorial. GT includes tools to build interactive slideshows, monitoring of task completion, and explanatory links between documentation and live coding tools. The goal of this sub-project would be to transform an existing static tutorial into a live one that guides and monitors the student's progress.

  2. Implementing advanced graph layouts. For the algorithmically-inclined, this sub-project would focus on developing new or improved layouts for the existing graphical infrastructure. An example would be better force-based layouts that yield more aesthetically pleasing results that the existing, naive algorithm.

  3. Code bubbles for GT. GT has some basic infrastructure for programmatically building graphs of code snippets. This sub-project would focus on providing a better user experience for interactively creating graphs of "code bubbles", and sharing them with other users.

Contact: Oscar Nierstrasz and Tudor Girba