Monday at EclipseCon, the ceremony for the Eclipse Community Awards was held. The winner of the Best Open Source Eclipse RCP Application award was MyTourbook, 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 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 describes the video. You can see Wolfgang in a wheelchair wearing a blue helmet.