Over a month ago, I got an invitation to try out Hotmail evolved: Windows Live Mail Beta. I decided to go for it, since I don't use my Hotmail account for anything critical and most of my colleagues have switched over to using my Gmail account when they want to send me an email. I was disappointed but not surprised to find out that Windows Live Mail Beta is nowhere near fully functional in Firefox and Opera. The ony things you can do are: Read your mail, Delete your mail and Write a New Message. You can't attach files to mails. You can't edit in rich text mode. You can't even reply to mails that you get from within Firefox/Opera. This is a significant step BACKWARDS in functionality that already existed in Hotmail! Read the rest of this entry ...
Tim Altman reports that Opera has decided to open things up even more and start weekly builds. A new blog is in place to keep track of the Desktop Browser weekly builds and any other issues that might come up.
Though not as thoroughly tested as a beta or even preview build, weeklies are great news for me, since there was a rather serious bug in the latest Opera Preview 2 that was preventing me from using it at work (proxy issue).
I think the more open Opera's development process becomes, the larger its comunity will become. Now if only we could get an open bug database...
While attending this year's GDC I'm hoping to check out this session on Advanced Prototyping by Chaim Gingold and Chris Hecker of Maxis/Electronic Arts. Read the rest of this entry ...
Ah, the benefits of keeping your ear to the RSS/Atom wire. I found this entry in the svg-developers Yahoo! newsgroup which hints that the next version of Google Maps will have support for SVG. Looks like my Christmas Wish (see bottom of entry) may come true after all.
I followed some of the links, and it looks like the currently pre-alpha version of the Google Maps API (version 2.37) does indeed use some JavaScript to create a SVG <path> element (search for "svg" and "path"). Unfortunately, this thread says there are some bugs in the code (non-SVG related) that prevent people from using it at the moment.
Of course it's a little premature, maybe Google will decide that integrating SVG within an HTML page is too much of a hack job. I know I have given up once or twice on that, myself due to browser issues but seem to have struck upon a somewhat reasonable solution recently. Of course if they restrict their SVG usage to only Firefox and Opera, it will simplify the integration.
Anyway, if the next version of Google Maps does have SVG support it will surely be a sign that SVG is here to stay (even if Yahoo seems to have gone with a Flash-based approach). Looks like Mozilla's decision to include limited SVG support in Firefox 1.5 was a good one for SVG adoption after all.
Well, unfortunately I had to wait until I got home from work to try out the Opera 9 TP2 due to this unfortunate bug. However, it was by far worth the wait. Read the rest of this entry ...