I’m very happy to announce the release of the next version of Sourcemap, Sourcemap 0.7.5. Although we usually push incremental updates throughout the release cycle, this update became a little larger than we had imagined. A number of factors contributed to this, not the least of which was the influx of a lot of new members to Sourcemap over the last two months. We’ve redesigned things visually and architecturally – and hopefully we’ve added a few new features that you might find useful. I’ll give you a quick breakdown over what we’ve done. If you want to see exactly what we’ve been up to, feel free to hop on over to our wonderful new CodebaseHQ Site to check things out.

Redesigned Interface

We’ve redesigned the interface for a Sourcemap to allow much greater control of presentation. The map has been a central part of what makes a Sourcemap (its in the name after all). Now the interface is map centric, with room to browse parts, view alternative visualizations, or simply focus on and interact with the map. We’re really happy with this direction and we hope to continue down this path and see where it takes us.

More Visualizations

We’ve always had the map, but now that we have a nice new visualization engine we hope to be able to make lots of useful Sourcemap visualizations. We’ve started with one (charting) just to get the ball rolling. We hope to develop visualizations of our own that are useful to everyone but at the same time this is a nice place for new developers to start working with Sourcemaps – by creating visualizations of areas they care about.

Community Contribution

The site now includes a first draft of a more community focused interaction. To get started we’ve added support for comments on Sourcemaps and parts in the carbon catalogue. In addition we’ve added some simple favoriting capabilities to let you flag the Sourcemaps you like.

Improved Carbon Catalogue

Since we’ve started Sourcemap a lot has happened. One of the clear things we’ve learned is just how important the idea of an open carbon catalogue is to what we are doing. We’re focusing on making the carbon catalogue we’ve been building for Sourcemap just as useful and open a tool as the other things we’re doing. Searching, sorting and browsing through the catalogue to find the kinds of parts and materials you need – whether or not you use them to build a Sourcemap – is going to get a whole lot better.

Architectural Adjustments

While you might not see them, there have been a number of architectural changes under the hood. As we’ve begun to grow as a diverse team it’s becoming increasingly important that we make room for everyone to be able to contribute. Part of this process has been making sure our code is extensible and pluggable, with lots of room to grow. To that end we’ve made more clear structures for things like visualizations, secondary content and widgets. The visualization engine will allow for a simple event based system that makes it easy to add lots of different kinds of visualizations to Sourcemap (like charting). We’ve also begun work fine tuning our feeds and our api.

Next Steps

We’re in the planning phases for our next release of Sourcemap (currently targeted towards the end of January). If you have some features you think should make the cut, please let us know

| This entry was posted on Saturday, November 21st, 2009 at 1:43 am and is filed under Sourcemap. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.