codedread

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. Click To Read More...

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. Click To Read More...

Apparently Opera 9 TP2 will be released tomorrow. I’m excited about this because in numerous bug reports and emails that I’ve sent to Opera developers over the past 4 months, lately all I hear is “This is fixed in our current development build”. Well now I’ll get a chance to taste that - let’s hope we see numerous improvements in the SVG implementation. Opera Widgets sounds like a really cool concept too, taking on Mozilla’s XULRunner approach.

klog has written a library that handles drawing “about 80% of basic shapes” for SVG using nothing but DHTML. I haven’t tried it out yet, simply because all the browsers on all of my machines support SVG (Internet Explorer with the Adobe plugin, of course). I might actually uninstall ASV on one of my machines just to see how his library works. Click To Read More...

Nice commencement address speech by Bill Watterson, artist/author of Calvin & Hobbes comic strip. Kind of as a follow-up to my earlier post. Truth: “It’s surprising how hard we’ll work when the work is done just for ourselves.”.