U can touch this: touchifying an IDE
Benjamin Biegel, Julien Hoffmann, Artur Lipiński, Stephan Diehl · 2014
Touch gestures are not only often very intuitive, but their direct manipulation characteristics also help to reduce the cognitive load. Since software development poses complex cognitive demands, our goal is to exploit the advantages of direct manipulation to support professional software engineering processes. In this paper, we demonstrate how touch gestures can be used within a professional integrated development environment. As for that, we have enriched the Eclipse IDE with common and invertible multi-touch gestures which can be used for both controlling the graphical user interface and triggering built-in refactoring tools. The design of our extensions was informed by an early user study revealing problems of using the Eclipse IDE with the default touch support provided by the operating system. By using the emerging prototype during its implementation, we were able to iteratively improve the prototype based on our own experience and gain first insights into the potential of using direct manipulation methods within the IDE. First results suggest that using an additional touch device within the classical desktop setup enables a precise and fast work flow.