One reason I think Web Applications (as opposed to the now watered-down term of Rich Internet Applications) are great for users and developers, is because they do not need to be installed directly on the user's computer. This is one thing I think Adobe has misunderstood about the 'RIA' revolution with AIR. Read the rest of this entry ...
I had an epiphany of sorts this morning when discussing something with a colleague. Mind you, my day job now revolves around SVG so I am definitely biased but: If you wanted to create a vector image that is displayable on a variety of platforms and products, the only format that makes sense these days is SVG. It IS the interoperable choice for vector graphics. We have a lot of things to thank for this:
- Wikipedia's adoption of SVG as preferred image format
- Browser take-up of native rendering: Opera, Webkit, Firefox
- Platforms like Qt and Gnome continuously improving support for SVG
- Mobile industry take-up of SVG as the graphics format of choice (even mandated by 3GPP in Europe)
- Continuously improving tool support: Inkscape, NetBeans, Xara, Sketsa, GIMP, Ikivo
- Toolkit and CMS are now starting to take-up SVG: dojo and drupal
- Lots and lots of Free Clip Art (woops, the secret is out)
It's definitely a different world than it was 3-4 years ago. I don't think there's anything stopping the SVG train. Based on this, I think Microsoft and renewed Adobe support of SVG is inevitable. It's just sad that we'll likely have to drag them kicking and screaming (and only after Silverlight gets decent penetration, probably).
I came across Laurent Grégoire's CVS Quick Reference Card. I needed something quick and handy to put on my thumb drive, so I figured this would do. Only problem is that my Windows box only understood Adobe's PDF format. I've grown to really dislike PDF, primarily for the fact that the Adobe Acrobat Reader takes forever to come up and has become bloated. Since I have Adobe Acrobat Professional Version 8.0.0 installed here, I thought I'd see what formats I could convert the file into for doing some minor edits to the file Read the rest of this entry ...
Apparently this month is my month for slacking off in compelling blog content, so continuing in that vein here's a nice little screencap I took while getting Adobe Reader 8 "rammed" to me (I'm nicking this phrase from Rob). In fairness, installation took "only" about 10 minutes, but that initial figure and progress bar did hang there for several of those minutes, inciting my rage and the pressing of Alt+PrintScreen. 2.4 GHz, 512MB RAM. Thankfully, since that time I've got a new laptop that can handle these modern, bloated document readers...
I published my results of running ten different SVG implementations through the SVG Test Suite. Read the rest of this entry ...