jstn:

“Magic Lantern is an open platform for developing enhancements to the Canon 5D Mark II.” Right now its main additions are audio meters and zebra striping, but their goals are ambitious. I hope this is a trend that continues. Scripting would be the holy grail for me.

While I was riding my bike to work this morning I was thinking about how much hardware companies would benefit from open-source firmware, or even better, an SDK built on top of that. What if somebody did to cameras, what Apple did to cell-phones?

A $499 phone (without contract) can have Wi-Fi, GPS, high-quality display, SDK (a damn good one too), Bluetooth, cellular radio, camera, etc. And look at what developers have done to use those tools. What if developers had access to the internals of their cameras, and could release and distribute software for them?

I know that comparing a phone to a camera isn’t completely analogous, but that doesn’t mean the industry, or company smart enough to open things up, wouldn’t benefit from developers hacking at the devices.

Take a look at some of the wacky shit developers have spend a LOT of time doing.