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From: Tobias Reif <tobiasreif@...254...> To: Christian Schaller <uraeus@...55...> Cc: www-svg@...157... Subject: Re: SVG on the Desktop Date: Wed, 24 Mar 2004 11:18:42 +0100
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