Comments on: NYC January Mobile Monday

By: Vodafone Betavine - Licence to Roam

Vodafone Betavine - Licence to Roam — Wed, 07 Feb 2007 23:20:36 +0000

[...] you had gone to NYC Mobile Monday or just like developing things for mobile phones, you may be interested in the [...]

By: Rachel

Rachel — Wed, 07 Feb 2007 23:12:02 +0000

I wasn’t bored with the Vodafone explanation – it gave me some good informative, just surprised. I’m used to Vodafone being the big player and it takes a mental adjustment to see it otherwise in a different market.

By: Daniel Appelquist

Daniel Appelquist — Wed, 07 Feb 2007 22:47:43 +0000

Hi Rachel — glad you enjoyed the event. Sorry I had to bore you with an overview of Vodafone but most people in the U.S. just don’t know who we are. Just to follow up, Vodafone Betavine launched last week (at http://www.vodafonebetavine.net) and we are actively seeking participation by individual and small company developers. Hope you can drop by. Thanks, Dan.

By: Rachel

Rachel — Wed, 31 Jan 2007 18:59:53 +0000

Daniel, I would have liked to have gone – must have missed it on upcoming and I’m still trying to work out the best ways to find out what is happening in this town being pretty new. However, this time I would have not been able to go as was on a plane back from Chicago..I’ll look out for the next one.

By: Rachel

Rachel — Wed, 31 Jan 2007 18:55:38 +0000

Thanks, I knew I should have stayed and had a longer chat. Sometimes I go to things that are over my head just to get a feel for them. I loved this stuff and it gave me a good insight into what can be done, from a generalists viewpoint. Thanks to both of you for correcting me and keeping me learning.

By: chaals

chaals — Wed, 31 Jan 2007 18:32:16 +0000

Sorry, I should have been clearer. I was really tired, and forgot that people might not know everything there is to know about SVG support

Actually, Firefox has native support for huge chunks of SVG, but there are also big gaps that they haven’t done yet.

IE is effectively ahead of them, since they rely on the Adobe SVG plugin (or any other plugin, but the Adobe one is the best known and probably best of the bunch for desktop today). On the other hand Adobe has no plans to keep developing their plugin. They said they would actually withdraw it in a couple of years, but following an outcry from developers who were relying on it, including some vey large-scale deployments, they changed their minds…

Safari are the kids playing catch-up at the moment, without SVG native support in a release (it is in the nightly WebKit builds and apparently reasonable).

What I had meant to say about Firefox is that while they have an implementation it is lagging behind the others so it is currently the lowest common denominator (like IE has been in some ways over the years in some HTML/CSS stuff). Which means you can’t reliably use some of the really valuable things about SVG, like declarative animation, which makes authoring and tool development simple but gives you heaps of power and interactivity. Unless you’re only interested in “most of the web” as an audience.

Doug Schepers from 6th sense (who was at the event) has developed some javascript extensions to patch some of this. It is a hack solution, not really ready for prime-time applications, but it shows how the power could work.

By: Daniel Goldman

Daniel Goldman — Wed, 31 Jan 2007 18:27:30 +0000

Rachel, Charles McCathieNevile was over at our Opera user meetup in Manhattan -- too bad you missed it. http://operawatch.com/news/2007/01/visit-with-opera-in-new-york-city.html

By: Rachel

Rachel — Wed, 31 Jan 2007 03:54:56 +0000

The fact that Firefox does not support it was what I picked up from the talk – I’ve double checked notes and that was what was said. But I’ll take that with a large pinch of salt then

By: stelt

stelt — Wed, 31 Jan 2007 03:19:03 +0000

> SVG is perfect for building platform agnostic web applications, or would be if IE and firefox adopted it.

Opera is in the lead in implementing SVG, but Firefox sure does quite a bit too. IE doesn’t do it out of the box, but needs help from other software.

developing SVG is actually no rocket-science, see many examples via http://svg.startpagina.nl