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...

§237 · March 17, 2006 · Firefox, Opera, RIA, Software, SVG, Technology, Web · Comments Off on SVG News Digest: 2006-03-17 ·


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...

§234 · March 13, 2006 · Firefox, Microsoft, Opera, RIA, Software, Technology, Web · Comments Off on Windows Live Mail Improving ·


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.

CLICK HERE TO PLAY FREECELL

§232 · February 24, 2006 · Games, RIA, Software, SVG, Technology, Web · Comments Off on SVG Time Waster Game: FreeCell ·


Raster image of my SVG web statistics

Ok, I finally got around to updating my SVG web statistics, a little over a month since I first posted them. Many thanks to Johan, Rob and Jonathan for handy code and suggestions. I hope you like it. It's located at the same place as before.

I've added some drag interactivity to it. At this time it is quite responsive in IE+ASV, but less so in other implementations (Firefox 1.5 and Opera 9 TP2). Dragging using my library is slightly slower than it used to be because, in order to get "slider" dragging, I had to add constraints to each draggable entity (so that you can't freeform move it around the page). This adds conditional checking every time the entity is dragged, but I see no way around this. Hopefully smart guys like Johan will take a look at my JS and show me the idiocy of my ways. 😉

CLICK HERE TO LOOK AT MY SVG WEB STATS

§231 · February 20, 2006 · JavaScript, RIA, Software, SVG, Technology, Web · Comments Off on Pretty Web Statistics Version 2 ·


While scouring the web for SVG news on Friday from my various channels I came across an article which has a nice and short summary of vector graphics concepts and languages currently in the wild. However... Read the rest of this entry ...

§229 · February 19, 2006 · Software, SVG, Technology, Web · Comments Off on SVG is Text: Get Over It ·