Renesis Technology Preview #1 … Finally

The biggest SVG news last month was that EvolGrafiX finally released a preview of its SVG viewer: Renesis. The viewer is only a static file viewer (does not support opening web documents), has limited support for animation, text or scripting but it is the first SVGT 1.2 player we get a chance to play with (new features like SVG 1.2 Event Handlers, uDOM). Coming on news of a Preview, EvolGrafiX has hinted that the Renesis is being taken over by as-yet-unnamed company.

ajaxSketch Released

Even though some web developers had problems both with using the prefix AJAX to capitalize on the buzz and the fact that it uses a Mozilla-only technology (XUL), the ajaxSketch demo was released. The good news is that it uses SVG+XUL to deliver a nice little web-based drawing application. Of course the demo only works in Firefox 1.5.

RichDraw

Mark Finkle has been doing some fantastic work on converting VML to SVG. His latest creation is a similar rich-graphics editor similar to ajaxSketch called RichDraw which apparently works in IE 6, Firefox 1.5 and Opera 9.

Portable Inkscape

Portable Inkscape OS X was released this month. It basically allows you to put a working copy of the open-source SVG editor Inkscape (with personal settings) onto a portable device (such as a USB thumb drive). For Mac only at this time

Cross-Browser Drawing API

I reported this here itself. Basically Google helped sponsor putting together a cross-browser drawing API that supports canvas functionality.

Dojo Supports VML

This piece mentions that Dojo now supports VML. Look for support for SVG in the future. [Edit: Dylan corrected me in the comments below. Dojo already supports inline SVG and what this notice is about is abstracting things to a common drawing API (similar concept to the API mentioned above)]

Use SVG to Render 3D Objects

The folks in the PEAR framework folks have put together a “driver” that renders 3D objects using SVG in web browsers for Image_3D. While it’s still very slow, it looks like amazing work.