Oh c'mon dude. I probably shouldn't be adding fuel to the fire, but if there is one contribution above all else that StreetDeck has made it was bringing in car gestural technology to the main stream. We didn't invent gesture recognition technology nor were we the first to use it in the car, but at a minimum we were the first to integrate tightly into a UI that made it accesible to anyone with a touchscreen. The whole UI was originally designed around the concept. The lack of buttons and the need for 3D accelerated technology to render fading and color changing gestures were all driven by the original in vehicle HCI research (http://scholar.lib.vt.edu/theses/ava...182003-164858/) started over 6 years ago that is at the very foundation of StreetDeck. StreetDeck was finally released to the general public in January of 2006 and a month after seeing it in action, some of the technology in StreetDeck was copied in RoadRunner http://www.mp3car.com/vbulletin/road-runner/70138-rr-2-19-06-extras-fixes.html

RoadRunner is a fantastic open source project that is one of the many driving forces that causes us to constantly make StreetDeck better, my only problem with it is that a few people seem to use it as a reason to hate StreetDeck for charging money for the software we write. Our goal with StreetDeck is to bring open architecture car computers to the masses and our biggest competition is traditional embedded infotainment devices. The more interest car computers of any kind get, the better it is for us, even if that interest does not originate from our software it still helps us with our ultimate goal at which time we just have to make sure we have the best product out there. The other free projects on the mp3car forums have alot of nice features and I encourage everyone on the forums to go out and try all the other competing software and tell us what's wrong with StreetDeck.