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New Multitouch SDK and a New Site Coming in March!

It’s February 2012. For Open Exhibits, this means we are approaching the halfway point in our three-year project. Over the last 18 months, we’ve been working hard and have learned a lot, mostly from you, our community members. Late last year, we posted our one-year evaluation. We also had a number of conversations with our partners and advisors.

The result? Major updates are underway. All of these changes are planned for public release in March. Here’s what’s coming.

New Software

• A new Open Exhibits SDK (software development kit). Version 2.0 with support for the Gesture Markup Language and a vastly improved gesture “engine.”
• New and rebuilt modules including a vastly improved collection viewer.

Want a sneak peak? Our developers are currently working on an alpha release of the SDK. Drop us a line if you want to test it out.

A New Look and New Features for the Open Exhibits Website
The Open Exhibits website will have a new look. We are completely redesigning the site, making it more intuitive and user friendly.

In addition, we are adding a major new feature, called the “Wanted Board”, where we hope to match needs of our museum community members with developers. This feature will include software, graphic development, hardware, and even research. We have the flexibility to add modest “Cash Bounties” on some of these items to help see them through. (You can see mockup of the Wanted Board on the Open Exhibits Flickr site.)

We have been working closely with The Tech Open Source to develop this new feature and they are going to help sponsor some of the items that appear in the wanted board.

Once again, thanks to those community members who help contribute to the Open Exhibits community. These improvements were made possible thanks to your feedback. We will be following up with another round evaluation, to learn more about how we can further improve Open Exhibits. Carrie Williar will be contacting some of you directly.

Finally, you don’t have to wait to hear from us. If you have something to say about Open Exhibits, we want your feedback. You can contact Carrie directly with suggestions by email at carrie@openexhibits.org