• 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!

Opera Software unveiled today the new Opera build with a technology called Opera Unite. I updated the package in openSUSE Factory Non-OSS repository, so you can try it out. Factory package can be installed on older openSUSE releases too, because they are not built against particular libraries.

You are probably wondering what exactly is Unite? Simply put, it is a cloud architecture, where cloud nodes are computers of the individual users or more specifically Opera instances running on them. More marketing-friendly citation from Unite FAQ says:

Opera Unite is a form of collaboration technology that allows you to share data such as files or photos with other users, directly from your computer . You can also communicate directly with others by hosting chat sessions or posting notes. The technology behind Opera Unite uses a compact server inside the Opera desktop browser to share data and services. With Opera Unite, there is no need to waste time uploading content you want to share. You share the content directly from your computer rather than loading it and sharing it through a third-party server.

Folks at Opera also created this instruction video to help you get started. Even more information can be found in an introduction from developers and Unite User Guide.

If you want to know how this technology works under the hood or you are willing to create plug-ins (or so called Unite Services) I recommend reading Developer’s Primer.

That’s it! Go ahead and try it out! Also let me know what you think of it in your comments …

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.

I was playing with the rounded corners and I like this feature a lot, but I also hit one problem (in all 3 engines). When you use the border-radius with an img element, the image is drawn above the border, so it isn’t rounded (left example). Fortunately, the effect could be easily achieved by rounded div, setting its dimensions exactly to the image size and using the image as the div‘s background (right example).

<img style="border: 2px solid black; border-radius: 30px; -moz-border-radius: 30px; -khtml-border-radius: 30px; -webkit-border-radius: 30px;" src="presov.jpg" />	<div style="border: 2px solid black; border-radius: 30px; -moz-border-radius: 30px; -khtml-border-radius: 30px; -webkit-border-radius: 30px; width: 180px; height: 240px; background: url('presov.jpg');" />

Update#1: I reported the issue to Gecko, KHTML and WebKit bugzillas.

Update#2: Dave Hyatt closed the WebKit bug with the comment: “This was fixed recently.” \o/