There's something comforting about coming back to your blog after spending so much time on Twitter and the like. Twitter is great for learning about new things and sharing links quickly, but writing this entry in WordPress and not having to worry about a character limit feels... cozy. I thought I'd come back to the blog and try to give an update on what I've been doing lately.
Despite the silence on the blog, I've actually been really busy with all sorts of different projects. I think I've got my fingers in too many pies now. And all of them happen to be related to Scalable Vector Graphics. How did this happen?
SVG-edit
As mentioned earlier on my blog, in my spare time I've been hacking a little at SVG-edit and its child project jGraduate. It's now at a point on the SVG-edit trunk where you can actually pick a gradient for your stroke/fill, which is a pretty cool thing to see.
Other than myself, the list of active contributors to the project has dried up lately. This is to be expected on open source projects. So I'm looking for fresh blood to come into the project and implement some of the features we have planned for the 2.3 release. The Align tool would be a good place to start.
Scour
I've also been continuing to plug at Scour development, releasing version 0.16 of the script yesterday. It's starting to feel like diminishing returns lately on that front (i.e. a lot more number crunching and code going in and only marginal improvements to SVG file sizes). This is expected. I think the majority of features related to sane SVG reduction have been implemented. There are a couple big features I want to get to:
- Removing duplicate gradients (Done in 0.17)
- Removing redundant path segments after precision adjustment
- Parsing CSS/style elements
After that I'm expecting scour to go into a mostly bug-fix mode. If you want to propose additional features, file bugs or write some unit tests, please feel free to contribute!
SVG Open 2009
Earlier this year I volunteered to help out with the SVG Open Conference. Through some nice serendipity, we were able to get Google to host the event at their campus in Mountain View, California. The theme is "SVG Coming of Age". There are some really cool talks and workshops planned for this October and maybe a couple of surprises so I hope to see you there. I'll be the tall guy pulling out what remains of his gray hair.
Planet SVG
One of the things I'll be talking about at the SVG Open is the SVG community website that some of us have been poking at for what seems like forever. The site is 'live' but there are many ongoing improvements I want to make to the site. One of the recent updates was that a web-based version of Scour was added. It's not pretty yet, but it is functional.
So what are you working on?
svg-edit is an awesome project! Keep up the good work!
I’m planing an Mediawiki extension based on svg-edit and write some tutorials in German.
@fischx: Cool stuff! Actually I’ve been in contact with the Wikipedia folks too about potential future uses of svg-edit on Wikipedia
Have you thought about putting the code up on Github as opposed to Google Code? I find that Github is more encouraging towards forking and playing around with things.
@Benjamin: You’ll have to be more specific as to what you mean by ‘playing around with things’. I’ve never used github. I’ve used Launchpad and Google Code.
First, I’m much more comfortable with subversion (and bazaar) than git.
Second, the fact that Google Code comes with a built-in wiki, bug tracking, and source control made my decision easier. The fact that I could set the MIME type so that Google Code hosts the demos also was a big bonus – does git allows that?
As for forking – isn’t this a symptom of using subversion instead of a DVCS like git? Would it change your mind if we started using Mercurial on Google Code? Maybe if you went over some of the scenarios you had in mind it would help.
Ok, I just two three minutes looking at github. Looks like there is bug tracking and a wiki. Still not convinced a move would buy me anything (and the project is already well-established for several months on Google Code).
I have been looking at svgweb from Brad @ Google. The features are complete enough that I am using it for a production decision aid for real-time flood warning instead of ASV. Ran into a few issues but recoded the SVG a bit to work around most of them. Remaining issues are already posted as bugs. Nice tool.
@Jeff: jGraduate looks cool! Didn’t know about that; how do you manage to find the time to be involved in so many different things? 🙂 Congrats on the new Scour release as well; I heard there is an Inkscape extension now that embeds Scour?
@Bruce: Nice! Make sure to post a link to your project at http://code.google.com/p/svgweb/wiki/ProjectsUsingSVGWeb so we can keep you informed of new releases and bug fixes. BTW, SVG Web is a team effort from lots of folks not just Google, including Rick Masters, James Hight, help from Jeff Schiller, and more.