Since I’ve never used the KeyNote app in MacOS, or even Google Presentations, someone will have to give me the skinny on how this stacks up. But it looks nice! Even in Firefox 2 on my 8-year-old Ubuntu machine, the performance is acceptable. I should try it on my Macbook Pro. Check it out.

• There appears to be a formal agreement established between Microsoft and Novell to develop and support the Linux-based version of Microsoft’s Silverlight, called Moonlight.
• Speaking of Microsoft, Alex Russell of Dojo speaks of how poorly the Microsoft IE team has communicated future plans. I agree. It’s not a way to build trust among web developers who you’ve pissed off for so long. Where’s the news on the next version of IE after 7?
• Speaking of web browsers, Apple announced the iPodTouch, which will soon put WiFi web browsing capabilities (via Safari) into the hands of many a music geek. Couple that with the iPhone now selling for $200 less and I believe that Safari is soon going to be one of the most widely used browsers out there in the Mobile Web, competing head-to-head with the Opera Mini. When Safari 3 gets out of Beta and is distributed to its millions of users, we’ll suddenly see a huge increase in the number of users that can view SVG.
• Speaking of Opera, I mentioned yesterday that Opera 9.5 Alpha 1 was out. Here are some interesting performance results, though Mozilla evangelist Asa Dotzler is quick to point out that Opera still lacks an auto-update feature.

That’s it for now.

Weaning Off The Microsoft Juice

As a hobby, I develop in Linux these days using KDevelop. For Windows, I still use Microsoft’s Visual C++ because Developer’s Studio is still one of the best IDEs I’ve come across for Windows. Doug just released a self-contained Eclipse CDT plus MinGW compiler. If that doesn’t mean anything to you, so be it – but it’s something I’m excited about. Looks like he also acknowledges that Eclipse CDT can be slow/sluggish so probably still lots of work to do. I should get around to testing this one day. If you code C/C++ in Windows – what do you use?

Organizize Your Google Docs

Google Docs updates allow you to now organize your documents into online folders – and the web browser inches a little closer to a platform that replaces things you do with your operating system…

Google Maps Snaps

Via Download Squad, Google Maps has added an awesome new feature. Now if you don’t like the directions that you get, you can click and drag to change your route. The blue directional route snaps to the streets that you will have to take. Pretty impressive stuff (though I did notice that if you click and drag enough it can get pretty confused – I’m sure they’ll refine their snapping/merging algorithm).

Caught a whiff of this from Robert Scoble. Go watch some vloggers in a contest to make a music video and then vote for your favourites (each IP address is allowed 2 votes). My favourites:

• Irina’s Deathmatch Rap
• “Video Killed The Radio Star” spoof
• “Ironic” spoof
• “Anarchy In The Uk”
• Stepcats

And if you’re one of those who aren’t sure what a “video blog” is supposed to be or do, go watch this awesomeness and tell me you aren’t fired up about it by the end…

One suggestion: If you’re going to use simple IE detection, then why not use IE conditional comments rather than forcing other SVG-capable browsers to load and parse and run the JavaScript? Something like:

<!--[if IE]>
  <script type="text/javascript" src="SVG2SL.js"></script>
<![endif]-->

Google Spreadsheets Now Uses SVG For Charts

Via the Google Operating System Blog. Big news – looks like Google Docs now supports a charting/graphics in their Spreadsheets documents. And guess what – it uses SVG in cool browsers like Firefox and Opera (VML in Internet Explorer). Kick ass! Now I’ll have to see how well they import .XLS files…

Google Preparing an Online Presentation App

It may not be a Powerpoint-killer (yet), but Google bought TonicPoint and is going to integrate it into Google Docs as a Presentation component to its Google Docs online suite. It’s pretty cool that it uses SVG to do its bizness too.

With these two bits of news, I would say SVG has officially arrived on the web in a big way (c’mon it’s an integral part of Google’s “Office Killer” suite of apps).

Dojo Chart Benchmarking

Link to some performance data for Dojo.gfx charting (in SVG and VML). Looks like WebKit is something to look forward to!

Prototype Graphic Framework

Looks like Dojo.gfx has some competition. First Mochikit is cited as a key component behind TonicPoint (see article above) and now a new JS framework for drawing vectors based on the popular Prototype. Competition is nice, but I’d rather see somebody implement some IE-specific JS that will parse an SVG document and turn it into VML (that way I don’t have to deal with all these procedural calls to some new API, I can just write my SVG declaratively as it was meant to be).

Blobs

And if you’re looking for a cool little distraction – check out Blobular, a neat little SVG demo.

Dev Opera Article #3 up

Go read my latest article about SVG on Dev.Opera. It deals with SVG filters so I recommend using the Opera Web Browser (or recent Firefox 3 Trunk builds). You can comment here.

Slacker vs. Geek vs. Cool Chick

The PC vs. Mac commercials are probably the most parodied series of commercials ever, now here are some from Novell that add a twist. Many may have already caught these videos on the Novell site, but I thought I’d post the YouTube links because they’re a little easier to get at (and the audio has less of a hiss to it):

• Clip 1
• Clip 2
• Clip 3

Putting the hardware vs. software comparisons aside for a minute, my wife and I both liked these commercials (especially since I was watching them on a OpenSUSE 10.2 box). It figures that Linux would be friendly, savvy and somewhat hot chick.

Character Map on OpenSuse

Speaking of Linux, I was typing up some genealogy information on my OpenSUSE 10.2 box and could not find the equivalent “Character Map” application that Windows has at Start > Programs > Accessories > System Tools > Character Map to copy some characters like é and ï and to my clipboard. Can someone put me on the clue train? If there is no such application – how do people type those characters on a standard US-English keyboard?

[Update: Rob let me know below about the Gnome Character Map (Suse package in YaST is "gucharmap") and I've now installed it]

Snowstorm in April

It’s snowing today in the north-west Chicago suburbs. On April 11th, 2007. And not just a little flurry, more like the everything is covered in snow and it’s still coming down kind. What is up with the weather?

Winer on Graham on Microsoft

For the most part, I agree with what Dave Winer says about Microsoft here. Maybe not “dead” but largely “irrelevant” for a lot of people. On the other hand, I think Paul Graham is living in a little too insular a bubble if he rarely comes across a Windows box. And if you’re a web developer you still have to deal with the fact that most of the deployed browsers out there are Microsoft browsers, despite all the other great, standards-comforming, free browsers available.