Apple has released Safari 3 beta, and it features SVG support. This means that your SVG apps will become usable by another 4-5% of the Internet surfers (or, depending on your audience, a lot more than that, as Safari dominates the Mac browser market). Two other nice features that have caught my attention are tab drag-and-drop and textbox resizing (for those poorly designed web forms).
On a related note, Safari for Windows is sadly getting bad reports thus far (sadly because I think we’ve gone from an IE monoculture to a FF/IE duopoly, and I’d love to see more competition among browsers).
After almost two years of silence, Apache Batik has released version 1.7 beta 1. Depicter uses Batik internally, and one of the changes that seems interesting is the updated PDF transcoder (which we hope to use to export diagrams to PDF; we’re still playing with it).
Fooplot.com is a nice graphing calculator that uses the browser’s native SVG (in Firefox and Opera) or VML (in IE) to display function graphs. FooPlot can save to EPS, PDF, PNG, or SVG (though it seems to generate a broken SVG 1.1 DTD, which stops Squiggle in its tracks; Inkscape continues past the error). A nice touch is that you can embed the function to be graphed directly in the URL (http://fooplot.com/x^2+2*x+1).
There is another SVG-based graphing calculator, but it’s a Firefox extension (which may or may not be more convenient, depending on your location and browser of choice).
The LANL Tech Transfer Division has released RaveGrid, an image vectorization and segmentation application. A free version is available (a quick 2.1M download), which is supposedly more limited than the non-commercial and commercial licenses (though I wasn’t able to determine what those limitations were). As far as performance,
On a Pentium 2.13 GHz M processor with 2 GB RAM, this version vectorizes images at an average rate of 0.55 mega pixels per second.
The free alternatives are, of course, potrace and autotrace (and see this comparison).
Adobe will discontinue (end of life) their SVG plugin starting January 1, 2008. This is not so surprising given their new-found interest in Flash after acquiring Macromedia; what is surprising is that they plan to actually remove the plugin from the Adobe download area after 2009 (and no, third parties are not allowed to redistribute it under the current licence).
While Opera and Firefox have native SVG support, Internet Explorer, which still has the dominant market share, has no good alternatives (Mark Finkle’s VML-based SVG emulation is only a start). This is sure to spark outrage among application developers (though, to be honest, everyone knows that other than Flash or DHTML, there is no safe way).
Update: Adobe has yielded to pressure and agreed to continue distributing the plugin indefinitely (though there will be no further releases, in particular no Vista version).
