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VL
2006
IEEE

Code Thumbnails: Using Spatial Memory to Navigate Source Code

14 years 5 months ago
Code Thumbnails: Using Spatial Memory to Navigate Source Code
Modern development environments provide many features for navigating source code, yet recent studies show the developers still spend a tremendous amount of time just navigating. Since existing navigation features rely heavily on memorizing symbol names, we present a new design, called Code Thumbnails, intended to allow a developer to navigate source code by forming a spatial memory of it. To aid intra-file navigation, we add a thumbnail image of the file to the scrollbar, which makes any part of the file one click away. To aid interfile navigation, we provide a desktop of file thumbnail images, which make any part of any file one click away. We did a formative evaluation of the design with eleven experienced developers and present the results.
Robert DeLine, Mary Czerwinski, Brian Meyers, Gina
Added 12 Jun 2010
Updated 12 Jun 2010
Type Conference
Year 2006
Where VL
Authors Robert DeLine, Mary Czerwinski, Brian Meyers, Gina Venolia, Steven M. Drucker, George G. Robertson
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