I used to have a lot of respect for Adobe. Back in the mid-to-late 90s, Adobe FrameMaker was seriously considered a leading desktop publishing tool, Adobe Photoshop was the premiere choice for image editing, and Adobe's Acrobat Reader was a great little piece of free software (at a time when not much professional-quality software was downloadable for free). However, time has not been kind to the Acrobat Reader. Read the rest of this entry ...
I just spent the last few nights working on the user-interface code of this SDL 2D strategy game that I'm working on. It's finally come together nicely now. Read the rest of this entry ...
It may seem that Scalable Vector Graphics for the masses is stalling on the web, but I did find this interesting site which has some recent promising news about SVG's rising popularity on the mobile phone front. Mobile vendors Panasonic and Sony have announced models that support SVG.
I've ranted before about XML, but despite my ill feelings, it's obvious that XML is at the root of some very promising technologies. SVG is one of those and it's really a shame that it hasn't yet taken off. This older article from Slashdot hints that March 2005 we'll start to see Mozilla include native support of SVG (the masses will see this in Firefox 1.1, I think)...that will be VERY exciting indeed! Maybe we'll start to see something interesting happening on the web for SVG very soon. As far as I know this will be the first major web browser to have native SVG support.
If you're interested in learning more about SVG, check out http://www.svgbasics.com for an overview of some of its capabilities. If you haven't installed Adobe's SVG Plug-In, don't worry you can turn off "SVG" examples on this site and just see what they would like if you had the plugin. Or you could follow the intructions at svgbasics.com and install the Plug-In.
I just noticed today on the cover of EETimes that the Embedded Systems Conference is giving away free passes to the "Expo"-type activity. The Embedded Conferance takes place in San Francisco, at the Moscone Convention Center, March 8-10. Ironically, Rob and I will be in SF March 9-12 for the GDC and, since it looks like we're missing some of the goodies at GDC (like the Awards ceremony and the Booth Crawl), it seems that we might be able to check it out, at least go look at some of the booths.
The only other thing that could make this more interesting is if the Scotch Tasting Festival that is supposed to take place in SF on March 5th gets delayed by one week 😉
We had our first family photo today. The following is a post-mortem on that experience. Read the rest of this entry ...