Latest News (page 4)

A new Release v0.7 of the Standalone and IE-Pluginable Renesis® SVG Player is out. What's special on this version is the all-in-new Font and Text Engine which supports things like Unicode, Embedded Fonts, Text Selection, Copy to Clipboard, Text-Anchoring, Font-Stretching, Text-Decorations and much much more. The perfomance of the text engine should have improved as well. Other news are many many bugfixes and improvements based on our bugtracker as well as fixing one huge issue that caused a lot of crashes on various platforms. The next release is planned for somewhere between Juli and August 2007 and will mainly be a maintenance Release that will get a completely rewritten DOM Structure (not the EcmaScript binding!). Why should you care? As of now, inserting a lot of elements (especially text nodes) causes a lot of memory overhead and speed loss. The new structure system should shorten down the used memory to as low as 30-40% for dynamic changes as well as speed up the dynamic changes by a factor of 4-10x at a minimum so stay tuned! As always, comments, thoughts and questions are always very welcome into our forum.

The Renesis® SVG Player can be downloaded from http://www.emiasys.net

Five years after the debut of its award-winning Open Source drawing program for children, New Breed Software is happy to announce the release of Tux Paint 0.9.17.

Among numerous other updates and improvements, Tux Paint's well-loved Stamp tool is now cleaner, more flexible, and easier to use than ever. The addition of a smoothing filter minimizes pixelation when photographic stamps are scaled up, while newly added support for the Scalable Vector Graphics file format allows for byte-thrifty stamps that can scale up without any pixelation or blurring at all. Lastly, the constantly growing collection of stamps is now separated into categories (plants, animals, holidays, and so forth) for easier navigation.

For a complete list of changes, see the Tux Paint change log and Tux Paint Stamps change log.

Tux Paint 0.9.17 is available immediately for Microsoft Windows and Linux, with a Mac OS X version coming soon. It is available for download free of charge from the Tux Paint website.

For those of you interested in using Java ME and SVG to create cool looking applications for mobile devices, a new site has been launched which contains tutorials to get you started, many exciting demos demonstrating the power of SVG and Java ME, and resources for more information. All the code (including SVG files) is made available for experimentation and use. The examples range from the simple, "Changing Colors of SVG Elements", "Triggering an Animation" to the complex, "Location Based Services", "Rasterizing SVG Content", etc. Even if you are not a Java ME developer, there is an "Intro to SVG" section that is worth a peek. Also, refer to the ME Application Developer Interest forum for active discussions about developing applications for the Java ME platform.

JMobile (http://www.jmobileproduct.com/) is an innovative, SVG-based, fully mobile HMI platform for real-time monitoring and control of remote equipment. JMobile runs on virtually any mobile device, including PCs, cell phones and PDAs. You can use JMobile to view live data from factory equipment, consumer appliances - virtually anything that has TCP/IP connectivity. For example, you can use your cell phone to check the cycling data of a test system, check an alarm, re-set an access gate code, or update the timer on a security lighting system from virtually anywhere. JMobile makes it easy.

The JMobile Client is a small software application that you download to your PC, cell phone, PDA, or other mobile device. JMobile operates as a thin mobile client and supports run-time systems used on most mobile devices, including Symbian 9.0, Windows Mobile 5.0 and Windows.

With JMobile Studio you design online each page (screen) that you want to appear in run-time on a JMobile-enabled client device. You then see your remote data visualized as you need it on the live pages, whether as meters, gauges, buttons, or other graphical images. What is designed in JMobile Studio becomes live on the JMobile-enabled device screen, showing current data from the remote equipment.

What is the advantage of JMobile? The richness and accuracy of SVG-based graphical elements combined with a simple thin client lets you create your own command system for remote control. No other system in the world today offers such a flexible solution.

If you are interested in JMobile technology or in licensing, please e-mail info@jmobileproduct.com .

A public beta of Apple's Safari 3 browser has been released. SVG support has been included in the Safari nightly builds for some time, but this is the first version usable by non-geeks. In addition, Safari is now available on Windows making it a serious contender in the SVG implementation landscape.

The submission system of the SVG Open 2007 conference, to be held in Tokyo/Japan from September 4-7, 2007, is now ready. People interested in contributing in the form of presentations or courses are welcome to submit their abstracts at the SVG Open Homepage (http://www.svgopen.org/). The official Call for Participation can be found at http://www.svgopen.org/call_en.shtml

Kiyut just released Sketsa SVG Graphics Editor 4.2.2, a cross platform vector drawing application based on SVG. It features various tools for optimizing content creation, giving designers unsurpassed support for creativity. These tools include property palette, source editor, resources editor, SVG specific shape tools, transformation tools, and additional illustration tools. Sketsa uses SVG as a native file format.

The first day of the W3C SVG Working Group's face to face meeting which will be taking place on June 5th in Zürich, Switzerland will be spent testing implementations against the beta test suite. Implementors are invited to attend or send in the latest versions of their implementations. Contact the SVG Working Group for further details.

Finally the all-in-new Renesis Player v0.6 has been released. This is the first version that is capable of loading most of the available SVG documents on the Web and elsewhere. Improvements in this version amongst many fixes include:

• Support for CSS
• Rewritten DOM (Supports DOM3, DOM3 Events now)
• Raster Images (JPEG, PNG, and GIF)
• getURL/postURL
• <use> and <symbol> support
• Improved scripting capabilities
• Speed Improvements

Check it out at http://www.emiasys.net. As always, suggestions and bug reports are very welcome.

The SVG Working Group is pleased to announce an update to the SVG Print specification: SVG Print 1.2, Part 1: Primer and SVG Print 1.2, Part 2: Language.

SVG Print 1.2 updates the earlier SVG print specification. SVG Print adds multiple pages and color management (both needed for print), and also adds new color interpolation spaces to lift the restriction on colors in the sRGB gamut.

The SVG Working group is pleased to announce the publication of the SVG Filter Requirements, SVG Filters 1.2, Part 1: Primer and SVG Filters 1.2, Part 2: Language specifications.

SVG Filters were previously published as part of SVG 1.1. The new documents republish that functionality as an add-on for SVG Tiny 1.2, with corrections and clarifications and a few new features such as shortcut filters (dropshadow ..) and control over filter regions. This specification is also resuable by other specifications like CSS or XSL.

New Tools to Further the Development and Deployment of Rich Media Services based on Open Standards

Stockholm, Sweden - March 2007 - Ikivo AB, the leading provider of rich media open standards-based software solutions for mobile devices today announces the general availability of Ikivo IDE and the Ikivo CDK. These tools, which form part of the Ikivo Enrich product family, further extend the tool portfolio available to developers to deploy rich media services based on open standards.

The Ikivo Integrated Development Environment (IDE) is a powerful environment for the development of scripted mobile applications based on Eclipse and SVG Tiny. It provides a complete environment for editing, debugging and testing ECMAScript with SVG Tiny content.

Ikivo IDE is integrated with Ikivo Animator and is therefore a natural extension to the current Mobile Design Workflow within the Ikivo Enrich environment. The Ikivo IDE is available to purchase from www.ikivo.com. It is available for a special introductory price of $169 (€129, £79) (usual recommended retail price is $449 (€339, £229). It is also currently available to purchase as a promotional bundle with Animator for $349 (€295, £199).

The Ikivo Content Development Kit (CDK) enables the design and deployment of professional, animated rich media content based on SVG Tiny for mass-market mobile phones. It encompasses a set of tools ideal for any content designer creating and deploying rich media content for mobile phones. The Ikivo CDK is free of charge and is available for immediate download from www.ikivo.com.

Altsoft announces the release of its new Xml2PDF 2007 family of products, containing Xml2PDF Server 2007 (.NET API), Xml2PDF Workstation 2007 and AltViewer 2007.

The three updated LearnSVG.com tutorials are now available for free and cover SVG Basics, ECMAScript, and Mathematics. They are compatible with Firefox 2, Opera 9.1, and Batik 1.7 and can be downloaded here: SVG Tutorials

The Apache Batik team is proud to announce the long-awaited release of Apache Batik version 1.7beta1, a Java-based toolkit for processing SVG. This is the first release of Batik in approximately two years, and brings many new features and improvements over version 1.6.