Monday at EclipseCon [1], the ceremony for the Eclipse Community Awards [2] was held. The winner of the Best Open Source Eclipse RCP Application award was MyTourbook [3], created by Wolfgang Schramm. MyTourbook is an Eclipse application that can visualize and analyze tours which are recorded by a GPS device, ergometer, bike computer or exercise computer. Main features include transferring or importing tour data, visualizing a tour in a chart with different graphs, visualizing a tour in a map, showing statistics, comparing tours automatically by altitude, and managing tours for different people.

Wolfgang wasn't able to attend the awards ceremony but he sent in an acceptance speech that I think is worth sharing with the Eclipse community:

"I started the MyTourbook project in May 2005. However, in October 2005 I had an accident with my bicycle. Nothing was broken in my body but I had a severe, traumatic brain injury, and without my bicycle helmet I probably would have died. I was in a coma for 3 weeks, and for the first 3 months after the accident, I had absolutely no interest in MyTourbook. However I started to try to understand what I had developed before the accident and ias time passed and as I recovered, I started to implement new features.

Having such an injury as I did, the statistics state that 40% of the people will die, 40% have mental handicaps and only 20% recover without major defects. I still have some limitations, but the MyTourbook project helped me to this project helped me to rebuild my mental faculties by implementing challenging features. One limitation which I still have is my short term memory, because I can't remember things as well as I did before the accident, but Eclipse helps me to circumvent my memory limitation using bookmarks, introducing errors, using search capabilities and using other memory-saver features.

Today, I'm physically recovered and I cycled 5,000 miles last year.

I would very much like to thank my relatives and friends who helped me, excellently and absolutely, to recover, and I also thank you Eclipse and everyone for supporting me." - Wolfgang Schramm

Wolfgang has a video showing his recovery [4] in rehabilitation as well as four other people who had the same injury, but didn't recover as he did (video is in Swiss German). The website http://www.sf.tv/sf1/dok/index.php?docid=20060323_2000_SF1 [5] describes the video. You can see Wolfgang in a wheelchair wearing a blue helmet.