Announcing OpenVista CIS v0.9

This weekend, the development team at Medsphere (Pete, Anthony, Cesar, Cody, Jon, Bailey, Thomas and Ben) have the distinct pleasure of releasing OpenVista Clinical Information System (CIS) to the public under a modified version of the MPL called the MSPL.

This release represents about 100k lines of C# code developed over the last 3 years that is fully internationalized (partial translations are available in pt_BR and es_AR), and fully cross-platform, utilizing the Mono runtime on Linux and the .NET Runtime on Windows.

I've personally spent the last 2 years working on this project and it's wonderful to finally fulfill Steve and Scott Shreeve's dream of having a fully open-source Electronic Health Record for hospitals available to the public. Many of you may be familiar with the court case involving the Shreeves, and while I don't find it necessary to throw my personal opinion into the fray, I hope that this release will help put all this behind us.

While many of my compatriots may opt to discuss the technology behind OpenVista CIS, I'll instead highlight the parts that truly interest me -- the eye candy!

Over the past year, I have worked very closely with acclaimed Swedish icon designer Andreas Nilsson, to create a consistent set of icons to represent the various functions in the GUI. We chose the Tango/gnome-icon-theme style because the Tango look and feel was designed to blend in well on Windows, KDE , Mac OS X and of course, GNOME desktops. From jimmac's Tango post:

As for the style itself, we wanted something that's not a strong and unique look. We incorporated elements of Windows XP, Mac OS X, KDE and GNOME style into the mix. The Firefox themes were a great influence. The goal was not to create an average theme, but something that wouldn't look completely out of place on the mentioned desktop systems.

Here is a taste of what he was able to come up with:

And an added bonus, all these icons are licensed under the GPL.

Over the next couple of weeks, I'll spend some time (in theory) highlighting other parts of the OpenVista CIS interface, and the difficulties we faced in developing it.