Next Generation Mobile SVG for Everyone

A little over a month ago the SVG Tiny 1.2 specification became a Candidate Recommendation, one of the final stage of development of a W3C specification where the technical work is expected to be frozen and mostly complete and implementors are requested to send their implementations in order to check the technical validity of it all. As the press release states, SVG Tiny 1.2 is well on track to be adopted across Mobile Industry bodies such as OMA, 3GPP and OMTP. Also, for the last 18 months, all interested parties in the industry, such as carriers and terminal manufacturers, have all been evaluating how best to use SVGT 1.2 in their products. However, when it comes to smaller organizations such as mid-size content providers and small mobile design studios and application development houses, SVGT 1.2 has been locked away.

Even though SVGT 1.2 is a royalty-free and open standard, most of the actors in the mobile field implementing it are private companies building closed source software, such as BitFlash, Ikivo and Opera. As a matter of fact, open source is not such a common ticket on mobile devices as it is on desktop computers today, and besides a couple of Linux-powered devices from Motorola and Nokia and the WebKit-based S60 browser, mobile phone software is virtually always closed-source. Further than that, the vast majority of mobile phones are based on completely closed platforms (RTOS) that prevent developers and third parties to developer native software, and J2ME is usually the only option, apart from S60. So, in my experience, most developers and content creators out there wanting to give new mobile technology a shot use S60 devices with beta software.

This approach is available for SVGT 1.2 today, but only to people who have the necessary structures to enter in agreements with BitFlash or Ikivo. This means that your organization has to have an interesting profile for them to justify the resources providing support to you while you evaluate the product, as well as having the right legal people in-house to enter such agreements. Basically, if you're just some guy out there with an idea and a will to experiment, you're likely to be on your own.

I fully understand why BitFlash or Ikivo choose to work that way though. The main reason I believe is that they need to control who gets to run their code in order to manage expectations and make sure no one jumps to the wrong conclusions with regards to their SVGT 1.2 implementation. Indeed, SVGT 1.2 has been so far in heavy development, and implementations of it were constantly being improved and changed to match the latest changes in the specification. Just releasing this stuff into the wild could have had very negative impact to the untrained eye where people could have just lynched precious work for some odd incompatibility with the unstable specification.

Now that SVGT 1.2 has entered Candidate Recommendation, and can thus be considered stable, it is time for all this to change. SVG Tiny 1.2 has an incredible feature set, and very big improvements over SVGT 1.1, much, much bigger than a 0.1 version number jump would suggest. The most obvious features are scripting with ECMAScript, audio and video support, fully synchronized with SVG animations, wrapped text within rectangles, gradient fills, transparency, etc. This new feature set is a big deal and opens up the door to a wide array of new usage for SVG on mobile devices and everyone out there should be able to try it out.

Flash Lite 2 and SVG Tiny 1.2 can easily be considered as tie-breakers on a feature-per-feature basis. The downside of Flash Lite 2 is a general lack of support from mobile industry bodies, no integration with J2ME and, so far, an insufficient backing from manufacturers. But if there is one place where Flash Lite 2 fares better currently is that an SDK for it is readily available to everyone who wants to experience that technology today. I really think BitFlash, Ikivo and any other fine purveyor of Mobile SVG software need to make a move now so that SVGT 1.2 fully has the shot it deserves to be the number one rich media technology on mobile phones in 2007 and beyond. Content Development Kits, or CDKs, should be made available to small-size content and application developers with a simple EULA and software for Windows (supplementary platforms would be even better) and S60. As for providing support for these CDKs, I think we can anticipate strong communities to emerge as soon as these CDKs become available and limit the efforts needed to get successful programs running.

Technology speaking, SVG Tiny 1.2 goes a long way towards what next-generation mobile services providers need, and the ball today is in the court of companies such as BitFlash, Ikivo, Opera and others to bridge the technology gap and provide evaluation players to hungry developers.

TextMate Book

The Pragmatic Programmers have a new title on the way with TextMate: Power Editing for the Mac, a beta book on my everyday text editor and programming tool, TextMate. Beta books are a great idea, where you can track the development of the book as it's being written by the author. Updates are sent to you each time the author thinks he's achieved a new milestone in the writing process of the book, using PDF with hyperlinking to go back and forth within the book, fully annotated by the author, etc. When you buy a beta book, you can even choose to receive the retail, printed version once the book is done with for a little more money. Likely a great resource to a very powerful and extensible tool.

Adobe kill their SVG Viewer all too soon

After years of nothing much going on around it, the venerable Adobe SVG Viewer is now officially going to pass away as Paton Lewis, a veteran of the Adobe SVG team, just announced it on the Yahoo! Groups svg-developers list. Adobe also posted a short FAQ detailing the process of the end of life of ASV and the key points are as follows:

• Support for ASV will cease on January 1st, 2007 and no more security patches will be issued
• There are know issues with running ASV on Vista, and there will be no steps taken to ensure certification
• Distribution via the Adobe website is terminated as of January 1st, 2008
• Further distribution will be allowed on intranets, but not on public sites, as per the EULA
• Adobe does not have plans to release the source code for ASV
• Existing SVG support in authoring tools is not under reconsideration

In today's situation, the gist of it is that there will be no significant support for SVG within Internet Explorer come 2008. There have been strong rumors of Microsoft moving in the direction of supporting SVG natively in future versions of Internet Explorer beyond version 7, but there are no firm public statements as to when this support would materialize, and 16 months from now might well be too soon for Microsoft to unveil this anticipated support. The main problem is that no decision maker out there can afford to place a bet on such potentialities, and the only real thing right now is that SVG support in Internet Explorer is going away fast.

Now, the fact that Adobe has decided to publicly announce the end to their efforts supporting SVG on the client is no suprise and can in fact be welcomed as a sign for the entire community to focus on native support of SVG in the browser, which is a task advanced at varous stages for all of the major alternative browsers (Firefox, Opera and Safari). The problem is that, to be blunt, Adobe is dropping the ball on this affair by pulling support and distribution much too soon. Adobe SVG alumnus emeritus Jon Ferraiolo, often regarded, and rightly so, as the godfather of SVG, and now leading the Open AJAX initiative at IBM, has posted a very spot-on response to his former's employer's announcement. Here are the key points:

• Instead of mere months, Adobe should provide at least 2 to 4 years of continued support for the product
• Adobe should donate the high-level source code for the viewer to the open source community
• But the most irresponsible part is to prevent any further distribution in 16 months

The last point to me is the key issue. Why would Adobe not continue distributing the plug-in via their website for years to come until native support in Internet Explorer is reliable enough or a viable plug-in alternative materializes. What would be the problem in just hosting a simple 3MB downloadable with just warnings about some of the known issues with Vista support? This move shows that further than officially telling the world that ASV development is over, Adobe is really getting out of its way to actually prevent the SVG ecosystem to peacefully get on with its life. If I had to choose one part for Adobe to reconsider, it would definitely be that one. Waiting for 2009 seems an absolute minimum before halting the distribution of what, today still, remains one of the most advanced solution for rich graphics in the browser. It's no secret that, following the acquisition of Macromedia, Adobe has placed its eggs in another basket in terms of standards-based client technologies, but such an abrupt termination of service is a very inconsiderate move from a company that despite its shortcomings, and missed opportunities regarding SVG, has always been supportive of SVG's development on the internet and in more specific industries.

At this point, it is not clear to me at all whether Adobe will be open to changes and discussions about how it proceeds to lay ASV to rest. But the entire community should come together and send a clear message to Adobe that they are going too far and that these terms are unacceptable to the community at large. Meanwhile, we can all continue to applaud the great progress made across the last few months by Opera, who have tremendous SVG Basic 1.1 support across their entire offering with their Opera 9 product line, the Mozilla community gearing up for a fantastic Firefox 3.0 release in the first part of 2007 and Safari's WebKit rendering engine progressing every day. Now is also a good time for Microsoft to step forward and show their dedication to supporting and advancing the core, shared set of Web technologies that they have been advocating and show Adobe that standards-based rich graphics have a flourishing future ahead of them.

UPDATE: Given the feedback from the community asking for more flexible dates for both end of support and end of download, Adobe have pushed back the dates to, respectively, January 1st 2008 and January 1st 2009. This is a much more reasonable timeframe and reflects better on Adobe's business practices.

UPDATE: With the continuous pressure from the community, Adobe decided to extend the distribution of their SVG Viewer indefinitely:

In response to customer feedback, Adobe has extended download availability once again for Adobe SVG Viewer.

Adobe does not currently have plans to remove Adobe SVG Viewer from the Adobe.com download area. Adobe recognizes that customers have built Web applications that depend on ASV being available for download, and although Adobe does not plan to develop ASV further, we plan for the existing versions to be available for download as long as our customers rely on them.

For the official announcement, please see http://www.adobe.com/svg/ eol.html

TextMate Snippet for JavaScript switch()

Gotta get started once on this blogging business, so I figure a light post about a quick and easy TextMate snippet will do the trick. Open up the Bundle Editor, select the JavaScript bundle, create a new snippet, enter switch for the activation string (the one that you type and follow by the Tab key in order to activate in your code) and set up source.js as the scope selector. The snippet itself is as follows:

switch (${1:expression}) {
  case '${2:case}' :
    // ${4:statements};
    break;
  case '${3:case}' :
    // ${5:statements};
    break;
  default :
    // ${6:statements};
}

Et voilà! I'll try to add more snippets and TextMate hacks in the future.

About this weblog

Hi, my name is Antoine Quint, and this is my weblog! I'm no pundit, but I reckon I'd like to share what sometimes may pop into my head and may be noteworthy. Might be a little piece of code, might be some ramblings or praise, might very well be something you don't absolutely need to read, but here it is nonetheless. If you want to get to know me beyond what I might post here, here are some very blog-like links: my flickr page and my LinkedIn profile. And in case you can't really take this style's page, well, you can always turn on a user style sheet, or just read this blog through a newsreader. I hope it proves enjoyable to read to some, and more importantly, to you. I'm out!