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Open Exhibits 2.5 – Coming This Fall

This November will mark the second year anniversary of Open Exhibits. Back then, we released version 1.0 of the Open Exhibits multitouch framework and launched the community site. In March of this year, we completely redesigned and rebuilt the website and released version 2.0 of the Open Exhibits SDK (software development kit).

Open Exhibits 2.5 builds on our prior releases, adding new functionality and stability to the current version. (GestureWorks, the commercial counterpart to Open Exhibits will be updated to version 3.5 just prior to the OE release.) Our expanded software team is pushing ahead with a series of new features for this major release.

New Components
Several new Open Exhibits Components will become available with version 2.5.  These include: Album Viewer, Flickr Viewer, Live Video Viewer, Wav Player and YouTube Player. In addition, the Map Viewer will be released, however due to changes in the Google Maps API key policy, the Map Viewer will use Modest Maps.

These components can be altered or combined by ActionScript developers to create new multitouch applications. They can also be customized by non-programmers by editing the Creative Markup Language XML (text) files that come with each component. This will make it even easier for author/editors to add media, change text descriptions, styles and basic layouts. 

New UI Elements
Another major feature is the inclusion of new UI Elements. These small functional user-interface elements make it easier for developers to customize and extend multitouch applications. The UI elements include: onscreen keyboard, magnifier, date picker, color picker, orb menu, dials, switches, and text input box. All of these elements are customizable and multitouch enabled.

Gesture Processing, Gesture Support and Improvements to the SDK
A number of improvements to the gesture engine and other features found within the Open Exhibits SDK (GestureWorks SDK) will be released with the new version. These include:

- Improved gesture support
- More efficient gesture processing
- Support for custom gesture event naming
- Improved built-in physics engine
- Added gestures including improved tap and hold gestures
- New Creative Markup Language (CML)  stand-alone player
- New layout algorithms 
- Powerful template-render kit
- New example and tutorial files and resources

We will elaborate on all of these new features, as we get closer to releasing Open Exhibits 2.5. We plan on announcing the release date in a couple of weeks.  Stay tuned, there is much more to come.