Majority Desk is a project that Dan McWeeney and I worked on this year for demo jam at SAP TechEd. It's basically a 3D rendered widget desktop ran by an open source physics server; and oh yeah, all user interaction is completely controlled by two Nintendo wiimotes. It supports full interaction with flash movies running on floating, spinning tiles. Cool, eh? 🙂 Some of the demo widgets even consume web services from an SAP Netweaver system. See, and you thought business was boring.
Majority Desk is powered by Adobe AIR and takes major advantage of many available open source projects surrounding the Flex community. We used Open Dynamics Engine wrapped with Python for the physics engine, Papervision3D for the 3D rendering, WiiFlash for the wiimote interaction, Tweener for the visual transitions, and Doug McCune as an Flex open source fountain of knowledge. If you are interested, Dan is planning on writing a blog post with more of the technical details. I will throw a link up once it is posted, or you could just just subscribe to his blog, which you should do anyway. He is one brilliant dude, and working with him has been career changing.
So without further ado, check out the demo below.
Here is an exclusive interview that we gave to the Redmonk guys before our demo in Las Vegas. They were the first to see it, because those guys rock!
Here are some photos of us on stage during the demo and the next day in the Community Clubhouse. If you think majority desk looks cool on your monitor, picture it on a 30 foot screen in front of a thousand people. Yep, that's me with my back to the audience "showing them my good side". These photos come from Dan's Zooomr stream and Marilyn Pratt's Flickr stream.
This one comes from Nancy Margulies and her beautiful "Community Mindspace" mural
We had a blast and the crowd really enjoyed themselves. We couldn't compete this year because we won last year with SAPlink, so we chose to break all the rules and just focus on blowing the crowd's socks off. I think it worked. 🙂
Last, but not least, I want to give a couple shout outs to some of the people that gave us inspiration, support, and encouragement to work on this crazy thing.
- Denis Browne - SAP Imagineering
- Doug McCune - Independent Extraordinaire
- Ryan Stewart - Adobe RIA Evangelist of Awesomeness
- Matthias Zeller - Adobe go to man for all things SAP
Some other Adobe guys that make Flash/Flex/AIR exciting and fun to work with.
Some other SAP guys that helped with the videos and actually make SAP fun to work with, if you can believe it.
And of course, my Redmonk peeps for doing the interview and always having other great blog content.
Some initial reactions out in the blogosphere:
- Synthesizer Developer - Dan McWeeney's thoughts on the future of software development
- Demo Jam highlight video
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- Day One of SAP TechEd '07: Keynote, Community Clubhouse, Demo Jam
- My TechEd Day 1 Highlights
- Majority Desk - Wiimote 3D widget desktop - totally sick
- The coolest thing: get your Wii Hands on
- Outside in development, deli.cio.us, democracy and the colgate twins
- Minority Report? No, Majority Desk!
- Ed explaining to Marilyn how to operate Majority Desk
- A 3D Desktop Controlled with Wiimotes and Built in Flex
- If We Can't Compete We Won't Follow the Rules
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