Ottawa Democamp

I'm just coming back from my first Ottawa Democamp. A DemoCamp is a small unconference-style event that allow you to show off your software or hardware and get feedback from an informed audience. Each demo has a 2 minute introduction, 8 minute demonstration, and 5 minutes for questions. This event is held regularly (each few months) in the Ottawa region. This time, it was held at The Clock Tower Pub on Bank Street.

One demo that caught my attention was the one about a new cross platform language called "eC". The talk was given by Jérôme Jacovella-St-Louis, the main developer and founder of Ecere corp. eC is a new object-oriented programming language that is based on the C language. In fact, it even use the gcc compiler do translate the eC source into native code. No only did Jérôme create a brand new language, he also created an IDE to create eC based user interfaces. The IDE looked like a classic VB 6 IDE. He showed us how you could create and change a button's label and color. The plans are to port eC to Linux and Mac in the near future. The demo applications where definively more fun to look at and where quite impressive. Mostly because they where using OpenGL which the eC language seem to support.

I asked the author if there was any big projects using this new language and the answer was basically no. I doubt that this new language will be picked up by software compagnies any time soon but maybe Jérôme will find a niche for his eC language.

Update: The language name is "eC" and not "Ec", updated my post. You can now go and learn more about eC at http://www.ecere.com/

Creative Voluntarily Delist From Nasdaq

Creative Technologies, best known for their Sound Blaster audio cards, announced that they would voluntarily delist from Nasdaq. They say that the low trading volume and relatively small number of share on NASDAQ did not justify having two primary listings (the other one being SGX-ST).

Creative Technology Press Release