stick's corner

During the last weekend we released version 2.3 of our in-browser SVG editor called SVG-edit. If I was a DnB producer I would call this a “massive” release, because it includes lots of new features. To name some of them:

• Rotate tool
• Polygon/Polyline Editing
• Linear Gradient Picking
• View and Edit Source
• Clone tool
• Align tool
• Firefox extension
• Opera widget

Jeff Schiller also prepared two screencasts. The older one is an introduction to SVG-edit, where he uses 2.2 version. And the newer one, which presents some of the new features included in 2.3 release.

Head here if you’d like to try SVG-edit yourself!

Thanks to hard work of Jeff, Narendra, Vidar and me, we managed to create today a 2.1 release of SVG-edit. Interesting changes include:

• tooltips for all UI elements
• editing of fill, stroke and group opacity
• selecting and moving elements
• saving SVG file
• adding end editing of text elements
• context panel for tools
• change rectangle radius
• controlling of the editor with keyboard shortcuts

You can try the 2.1 branch here:

Unfortunately the editor still has some problems when embedded into Google Wave, but now that Vidar received his invitation, I hope we’ll be able to fix it sooner. We are also already cooking new features for 2.2 so stay tuned!

Last week I announced cooperation with Narendra Sisodiya on a SVG-edit project. The inscrutable ways of twitter allowed Jeff Schiller, a co-chair of the W3C SVG Interest Group, to spot our efforts and later he contributed with various patches and implemented some new features like selecting and moving objects.

I was very surprised when I found out that Vidar Hokstad took trunk of SVG-edit (only two days after my blogpost!) and created a proof-of-concept gadget for Google Wave, the exactly same thing I would try to accomplish once the editor was more mature . I asked Vidar if he’s not interested in moving his source into our SVN, he agreed and is adjusting the gadget to work with the latest version of the editor right now.

I’m very happy that both guys jumped on our development train and the project gained momentum and visibility. We’ve also decided to change the license from GPLv2 to Apache License 2.0 to allow even broader adoption. A discussion group and an IRC channel #svg-edit on irc.freenode.net have been created for the ones who are interested in this project as well.

PS: The gadget is probably not yet usable inside Google Wave, but we are working on it and we’ll keep you posted about our progress … The work would go definitively faster if we all had Wave Sandbox access (people at Google: hint, hint ) and didn’t have to try everything only in Vidar’s Gadget API emulator.

Last weekend I was looking for a nice in-browser SVG editor. I found some alternatives, but no one was close to my ideals. Most feature complete was SVG editor by Chris Peto, but it has complicated interface based on CGUI and is also pretty heavy.

Then I stumbled upon svg-edit by Narendra Sisodiya. It was rather raw and lots of features were missing, but then I sat down, started hacking and after few hours I created quite a long list of changes. When I sent them to Narendra, he was so kind that he made me an administrator of the project, so I was able to push all my changes into SVN trunk and to continue the work there.

Today I finished all changes I wanted to fix before the relase, so I can present you the 2.0 release of SVG-edit! You can try for yourself by clicking on the next picture (this is pointer to trunk development version, so it might get messy in time ):

During the development I was testing it in Firefox and Opera and I’m sure there will be some problems in other browsers. If you hit any, do not hesitate and write me an e-mail or even better use the issue tracker on the project site.

Also there are some features that are still missing, but they are planned (like adding text, more complicated shapes or selecting, moving, scaling, rotating objects) and I hope they will be added in the near future.