EclipseCon 2006 Day 2

So today was the start of the Open Source Pavilion at EclipseCon, I spent almost the entire day there. I decided to head back to the hotel once it was finished rather than participate in any of the BOFs. My feet are quite tired and I am feeling quite tired myself.

Morning

The Pavilion opened at 9:30 and I was there right as it opened. My neighbours included Colin Samplaneau of Spring, Martin Perez of jLibrary, Carsten Pfeiffer of KDE, as well as the two guys from jFire whom I hope to speak with more tomorrow. Also nearby was GNOME and RadRails.

We were all located in the back corner of the exhibit hall, and we did not receive very much traffic in the morning. Around lunch a large wave of people came in as the other talks ended.

Mylar: A Task Focused UI For Eclipse

At 13:00 we had a break for two hours, so found a comfortable chair and just relaxed and at some food for a while, then I attended Mik Kersten's talk on Mylar. Us uDiggers know about the Mylar project, but I had never seen it in action before, and it is much larger than I thought. It seems capable of making development in Eclipse much more usable. I will definitely try it out when I return.

We implement a small Mylar-like feature in Eclipse that, when enabled, brightens the selected layers in contrast to the others. I am hoping he might stop by tomorrow and I can give him a demo and perhaps receive some input.

Evening Reception

At 15:00 we were all back at the pods and demoing away. Traffic steadily increased until there were actually people crowding around the pod and the laptop staring at uDig. It probably helped that they stationed an alcohol bar and food table nearby (Free beer! And delicious food - tempura vegetables, fruit, and miso tofu. Very delicious!). There was a fairly steady flow of people until closing time.

Some of the people who stopped by include:
Nick Edgar, one of the leader developers for the Eclipse RCP who asked for feedback on our experience with RCP, but I am afraid I did not give a very useful answer; Bruce Donald Campbell from the University of Washington, who was interested in UVic's Neptune project, as well as deep-sea research in the Juan de Fuca Strait; Lorenz Maierhofer of Logic Mind Guide; Anna Griffith of Discovery Machine who wanted to know if uDig could assist her with her gardening; and Dag Rende of Total Eclipse.

Some interesting notes:

Two people asked if we had thought about having the framework aspect of uDig hosted as an actual Eclipse project. I hadn't even thought of that before.

Jody's location view was a big hit. Combined with NASA's JPL satellite imagery, people were able to look at the area around their houses.

The update manager and community space also seemed very popular.

It looks like some photos have been posted. I saw Ed Burnette take a picture of the uDig pod, so hopefully it will be posted at some point.

I have also thought that it might be a fun idea to start an open-source BOF for tomorrow night, although it might be more interesting for me to attend some of the other ones.