Re: SVG on the Desktop

Hi Christian

On Tue 2004-03-23 Christian Schaller wrote:
> I thought I just point people here to my article on the use of SVG
> in the desktop. It summarizes the work we have done are and are
> doing with utilizing SVG in the Linux/Unix desktop:
> http://www.osnews.com/story.php?news_id=6460

Great article, thanks! I mainly use KDE, but perhaps Novell/Suse 10
will ship with a good GNOME (SVG) desktop :)

Besides the whole icon business; Are there plans to base the whole
(GNOME) desktop GUI on SVG? When I change the resolution of my screen,
then the size of every icon, text, window frame/decoration, menu,
taskbar, button, etc should stay the same; and I want to be able to
change the size of all this without having to change my screen's
resolution. Non-GNOME apps also would need to use SVG then, so perhaps
SVG needs to be incorporated at the X level? Does xsvg or Cairo help
with that?

Regarding editor forks:

"As the first draft of the SVG spec was released, work on another SVG
editor was undertaken - the now well-known Sodipodi drawing
application by Lauris Kaplinski. Sodipodi was partially based on Gill.
Over the next several months, Sodipodi progressed while Gill came to
an end as Raph's attention turned elsewhere."

This shows that forks and projects which build on the code of others
can be very useful, and can prevent an effort or a code base from
dying.

"All is not well in the house of roses though and later that month the
Sodipodi development team splits into two groups, and the Inkscape
project is born."

What's "not well" about this event? The reasons might be incompatible
view and ideas, but the outcome is good as far as I can see.

"This gives us two SVG editors/Vector drawing applications."

This is great, no? Users have one more choice, developers who want to
help with creating and evolving an SVG editor but don't fit into the
Sodipodi team/community might find a home in the Inkscape
team/community.

"Long running disagreements on topics ranging from GUI design, use of
external libraries, project goal and direction, programming language
used, and more resulted in the developers feeling that they would be
happier and more productive if they worked on two separate projects."

... thus it's great that they were constructive and active and started
their own project.

If Sodipodi would die, some of it's efforts and code might live on in
Inkscape (just as some Gill code lives on through Sodipodi if I
understood you correctly).

Neither Sodipodi nor Inkscape is mature enough yet (both still crash
and disappear from time to time), but I'm confident that they will
continue to evolve and mature and become more complete; competition
might very well help with that :)

BTW, Sodipodi already is very useful (just remember to save you work
often enough :), and those who use Illustrator to create Linux icons
could check out
http://zeus.qballcow.nl/icons.php
"QNX Gnome Theme 0.3.7
[...]
I made the whole icons using Sodipodi."

Pretty cool.

Something else:

An SVG-based GUI toolkit might also be an interesting project. People
could for example build scalable interfaces to their Ruby or Python
applications, with SVG.

Tobi

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Received on Wednesday, 24 March 2004 05:21:17 UTC