Tuesday September 30, 2008 Seapegasus Blog
Tuesday September 30, 2008 NetBeans Innovator Grant Winners Announced
You may have already seen it on netbeans.org, the winners of the NetBeans Innovators Grant have been announced. 13 open source innovators completed their projects and won prizes between $2000 and $11000! In the latest NetBeans podcast, Jiri Kovalsky mentions how impressed he was by the overall professionalism of the submissions. Although it always happens that project owners have to step back for various reasons (the program started out with 20 candidates), it was obvious that the teams took their projects very seriously.
Here are the projects that I liked best, you can get the full project list on the grants page.
- MONOH (named after the exclamation "[look] MOmmy, NO Hands!") lets you control Netbeans with spoken commands! :-D From experience I know that speech recognition thingies never really work for me (and I can't use it in an office environment anyway), but it's definitely the coolest idea.
- The Darkstar plugin adds support for massively multi-player online game development with the Darkstar server in NetBeans, and also some kind of Java ME support, but I didn't understand what exactly (anybody know?).
- The Sun SPOT plugin adds Sun SPOT project support to NetBeans (SPOTs are small Java-programmable devices with sensors).
- Cube°n was inspired by Eclipse's Mylin plugin and integrates task and bug tracking into the NetBeans IDE. (Screenshot)
- IvyBeans brings Apache Ivy project dependency management to your NetBeans projects. (Demo)
The sun.com news item contains more background info and two more quotes by winners.
I'm gonna try MONOH at home, and tell you more about it later this week. I'd have a nice idea what to do with two Sun SPOTs (think: Wii remote control), but before I shell out 600 Euros I need to think it through. Setting up my own Darkstar game server sounds tempting too. ;-) Well, if you have tried any of these new plugins and applications, please share your opinion with us! And if you want to join one of the projects and contribute to it, write the project owner.
Posted by seapegasus ( Sep 30 2008, 06:11:46 PM CEST ) Permalink
