We have released yet another production release of the Eclipse Dragonfly SDK – #6! More information is available here and you can download it here.

Aside from fixing some defects that magically got into the code, we added some important features as well (http://bugcommunity.com/wiki/index.php/SDK_New_and_Noteworthy_Features). One of these improvement makes integration with BUGnet work to the user’s advantage in the SDK. As BUGnet grows in the number of applications that are available to download and explore there is a need to sort out and present this information, after all this what we all are looking for – relevant information, isn’t this is why we love Google? This new feature is called ‘Applications by Modules’ and the idea is that once you connect your physical BUG or launch Virtual BUG a new section in BUGnet view will show relevant applications. The list of relevant applications is dynamic – so when modules are removed from or added to the BUGbase the application list will reflect that change.

Hope you are as excited about this and other improvement as we are! If you have other ideas – we are listening.

Please come by the Eclipse DemoCamp:

June 30th, at 7:00 pm
Spitzer’s
101 Rivington St (Map)

We’ll have Dragonfly SDK demo, some Bug Lab folks will be on hand, and we’d love to see you. Also, as always, you can share your ideas at our forums (http://bugcommunity.com/forums) or drop by our IRC channel #buglabs at FreeNode.

While browsing the usual tech blogs, I stumbled upon an article about a new addition to Google Maps – Google Maplets

The idea is that you can combine different Google Maps mashups that according to you make sense in a particular context and present these mashups on one map. Video presented by Google Maps product manager Thai Tran explains very well what Maplets are and can be seen here

What’s interesting about the video is not the presentation of the topic – it could have been any new
technology or gadget, but the last 10 seconds of it where Thai says “We can’t wait to see all the great things that you’ll create with maplets.” Why is this so important? One reason – us. We, human beings get bored too fast. Our minds are hungry for information and abstract thinking, we can’t just take something that performs one, two or ten things and be happy with it. We need something that can do whatever we want it to do, not something that it was programmed to do. We need to imagine
something and the make it.

This is the reason why Google Maps is so successful and important – anybody can create a simple mashup to express some data visually – just search mashups repository to find what you need and apply to your map. Found something that you can use but don’t like how it was done? Change it! Can’t find what you are looking for – create it! And from these three levels, beginner, intermediate and expert, your mind is no longer bound by some pre-programmed functions but by your imagination which we all know is infinite.

Now imagine the same phenomena in hardware world. For years hardware has been literally locked by vendors; take Sony for example, a good company but they virtually lock you into using their Memory Stick which is nothing more than a regular flash card made to Sony’s standards. Why lock users into using proprietary hardware that hardly differs from the widely available CF? One reason – money. They want you to use their product, that’s all. And this is just a small example of hardware monopoly by vendors. Their final goal is for consumer to buy new products even if they are just derivatives of previous ones.

Over the years the software industry has been changed with open source software and it has been proven to be a successful model, it’s about time hardware industry experienced the same open revolution.