During the event we had a wireless connection available, but it was rather unreliable, so it was no option for me to present the talk online. I started to investigate the offline options. Either you can download the full blown Prezi Desktop, which is available if you subscribe the service, or you just download the Prezi “Player”. But wait, the page claims it is compatible only with Windows and Mac OS X. Let’s see. I downloaded the ZIP archive and indeed – it contains data folder with your presentation, Windows application (prezi.exe) and Mac OS X application (prezi.app).

Let’s get hacking! Mac OS X application is in fact just a directory structure. I copied the file prezi.app/Contents/Resources/movie.swf to the same location as my data directory and tried to run flashplayer movie.swf. Wow! The presentation started to load, but unfortunately it stopped after few seconds and I ended with this:

I tried straceing the process, but found nothing unusual (like failed open calls). Then I downloaded the debug version of Flash Player, run the command again and got this exception:

An ActionScript error has occurred:
Error #2044: Unhandled SecurityErrorEvent:. text=Error #2140: Security sandbox violation:
file:///.../movie.swf/[[DYNAMIC]]/1 cannot load file:///.../data/fonts/LiberationSerif-Regular.swf.
Local-with-filesystem and local-with-networking SWF files cannot load each other.

Aha! Locally stored SWF files cannot load other SWF files, neither local ones, nor remote ones. That’s the problem. Ok, let’s change the standalone player settings. But how?! I tried various command line switch with no success. After couple minutes of searching I found that standalone Flash Player settings could be changed via Flash plugin that loads Settings manager from the Internet? WTF?!

I will make it easier for you: let’s google for “flash global security settings content creators”. The first result at the time of writing this article was this one. Go to this URL, wait until the Settings manager is loaded and then click on the “Edit locations …” button.

After that select “Add directory” and choose local directory where you store your presentations. From now on you enabled standalone Flash player to run your Prezis. Congratulations!

Even though I like Prezi, I would be ecstatic if they dropped Flash and used SVG instead as its presentation and interchange format, probably using the uber-cool SVG-edit as the core. It would also enable iPad users to use the tool. And yes, I know about JessyInk, but that’s not exactly what I have on mind …

• 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!

• 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.

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.