This may be slightly stale news to folks who keep their ear to the wire, but the Laszlo folks announced last month that they are planning on supporting DHTML as a compilation target some time this year. The current release of their Laszlo Presentation Server 3.2 supports compilation to Flash SWF6, SWF7 and SWF8. The next version (code-named "Legals", likely 4.0) will support compilation to DHTML and SWF9. You can also read their wikified current plan. If nothing else, you should check out the DHTML demo application to see what Laszlo will be capable of. Read the rest of this entry ...
Via Arve, the Opera Web Applications blog talks of how the Opera 9 Browser has made extensions to the canvas element specifically for authoring games for the browser. Read the rest of this entry ...
Renesis finally released their pre-alpha technical preview SVG player. My biggest complaint is that it's a standalone player that can't access the web, but I'll keep my complaints to a minimum because they've finally made good on their promises to release something. The sample SVG files that come with the player are nice, though!
On another front, Firefox's SVG Blog mentions that support for the SVG <textPath> element will likely be included in Firefox 2, which is good news. The alpha for Firefox 2 is due out next week. The earlier the better, I always say. Get it into more hands for testing. Hopefully they can also squeak in the DOM support for text that tor mentions.
Looks like the latest Opera 9 weekly build will be slightly delayed. Borg says they've made a lot of progress, hopefully this includes fixes to their proxy server issues which is preventing me from using the browser behind a firewall. We can always hope for improved SVG support too...
I reported about a month ago that Windows Live Mail (what will be the next Hotmail) didn't support the Mozilla Firefox web browser very well. It looks like they've done an update since then because now I'm able to reply, forward and move my mail messages around using Firefox. Too bad the latest Opera 9 nightly build is still horribly broken (can't get through a proxy), so I can't check that...
I decided to take my SVG Solitaire game and make it into FreeCell, the game that comes with Microsoft Windows. Click here to play. Requires IE+ASV, Firefox 1.5 or Opera 9 TP2
It took roughly 30 minutes to change Solitaire into FreeCell, then over 1 hour to debug stupid/silly errors. I was pretty tired last night, but that's probably a pretty good breakdown of the software development process (X minutes to design/code, at least 2X to test). Of course it still probably has some minor bugs here and there (please let me know) and I know the layout could use some work. Very playable in IE+ASV, but dragging cards is still pretty slow in Firefox 1.5 and Opera 9 TP2.