At the latest IDE Showdown conducted at JUG Cologne one of the demos showed by Roumen Strobl was about a desktop application which shows geospatial data - it's my blueMarine. Well, everybody that blogged about it referred as "an application showing Google Maps". It isn't! Actually it's using NASA World Wind for Java, and the imagery was from NASA too.

This isn't to be picky - just to give the right credits to NASA, but above all because showing Google Maps in a desktop application which doesn't use the Google APIs (which are AJAX based) is illegal. Actually some earlier previews of blueMarine had a Google plugin, but I removed it a couple of months ago when I realized that it was outside the terms of use by Google (incidentally, I also removed a plugin for Microsoft Visual Earth, in this case with some hopes of putting it back, as Microsoft terms of use are more liberal - basically I'm waiting for their explicit authorization).


Technorati Tags: IDE Showdown, NetBeans, blueMarine, NASA World Wind, Google Maps