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:
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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.
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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.
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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