Today I went to the magical Apple Store and tried out the iPad for the first time. I really have to say that it’s quite magical, though it doesn’t fulfill the criterion for Arthur C. Clarke’s Third Law despite what Jonathan Ive says. Though I really haven’t tried any large area multitouch interface before (sadly), and I would expect it to be a somewhat similar if not exact replica of the experience. Keynote and Numbers were pretty neat (I suck at typing on the iPad in any orientation, so I don’t like Pages). That’s enough to show that iPad is not just a content consumption tool as the iPod and iPhone primarily are, but also content creation.

Anyway, in a few minutes I just swapped the mousedown, mousemove, mouseup events with touchstart, touchmove, touchend events respectively in the core of VectorEditor, while adding a new MobileSafari detection script (var mobilesafari = /AppleWebKit.*Mobile/.test(navigator.userAgent);) and in a quite analogous “magical” way, VectorEditor works in iPhone/iPod Touch and theoretically iPad, Just dragging the vectoreditor files over to the Ajax Animator folder and recompiling should bring iPad support to Ajax Animator with virtually no work.

I haven’t tested it. Downloading XCode 3.2.2 right now so hopefully I can test it soon. Stupid how it’s what? 2.31 gigabytes?!

And possibly, I could use PhoneGap to hack together a App Store app which does the same thing (and maybe charge for it, which might be a bit cruel as this application is open source and works equivalently online - but I guess that’s okay for those people who don’t read my blog >:) ). Maybe get enough to buy an iPad :P

Anyway, though I’m pretty late to this and my opinion probably doesn’t matter at all, here’s a mini iPad review: It’s really really cool, feels sort of heavy, really expensive, hard to type on in any orientation (interestingly it has that little linke on the f and j keys with the keyboard which feels useless since I always thought the point of that was so you can tactile-ily or haptically or tactically or whatever the right word is, find the home row, but since there’s no physical dimension to an iPad, it just strikes me as weird and wanting of that tactile keyboard). Otherwise, browsing really really feels great. Only thing I miss is the Macbook Pro style 3 finger forward/backward gestures (@AAPL plz add this before iPad2.0, and also, get iPhoneOS 4.0 to work on my iPhone 2g or at least @DevTeam plz hack 4.0 for the 2g!).

Oh, and for those lucky enough to have a magical iPad, the URL is http://antimatter15.com/ajaxanimator/ipad/ at least until there’s enough testing to make sure that I didn’t screw up everything with my MobileSafari hacks.

Screenshot

Ubuntu’s weird and adding a bar on top of all my screenshots

http://antimatter15.com/ajaxanimator/VectorEditor/stickfigure.html

I like stick figures, and browsing YouTube, I found some things on Pivot and Pencil (really awesome free desktop animation apps), and that made me think, Stick figures are awesome. So I’m going to add some better Stick Figure features into Ajax Animator and possibly upstream to VectorEditor eventually.

I made a new minor update to vectoreditor which allows things to be resized, it’s not perfect, but works mostly.

For like an hour (so, not a really long time, and nothing near SVGWeb) or so, I was working on a new SVG shim similar to SVGWeb except that it renders to VML and SVG through Raphael rather than Flash (so now I can actually brag about not having any plugins :P). Using it is somewhat simpler than SVGWeb, except that you need some replacing, but no need for a server, htcs, etc. Plus, the file is only 3.2 kb uncompressed, only 740 bytes gzipped and YUI’d. Also, it only works with rectangles and ellipses but could be somewhat easily modified to support anything that raphael does. While probably it does not work on IE (as I use linux and have no way to test), it’s an interesting concept.

It only works with pages where a SVG element is added dynamically after the page is loaded (contrasting to SVGWeb which only allows a SVG element to be added in code).

var svgroot = rshimdoc.createElementNS(null, "svg"); //you coudl also just use normal createElement("svg"), but it must be rshimdoc instead of document

svgroot.setAttribute('width',100); 
svgroot.setAttribute('height', 100);


(new RHTMLElement(html element)).appendChild(svgroot)

OR

rshimdoc.getElementById(element id).appendChild(svgroot)

So it doesn’t deviate too much from the SVG spec (just replacing document with rsvgdoc should work). And in other news, I’m moving some of my smaller works to github, so this project is also going to be hosted on GitHub.

http://github.com/antimatter15/rsvgshim/tree/master

So I don’t actually have wave yet, but for all 2 of you (likely less) who have used pygowave, an open source third party implementation of the wave protocol. So there was how I developed it, I read through the APIs and tested on pygowave. So what does VectorEditor do that svg-edit and… erm… svg-edit don’t do?

First, VectorEditor for wave is really really real time. Waaay more real time than svg-edit (not really). But VectorEdit (VectorWave might be a nice name.. I’m going to try using that name from now on in this post) transmits the data such as even while the shape is still being drawn, rotated, or moved (rotation needs work). Another nice feature is that the transitions are animated so things are even more seamless.

Another important feature is shape locking. So when someone selects a shape, it gets locked and can’t be edited by anyone else. If anyone tries, an alert box appears saying “Shape shape:5sdfwef98dfe3ssdf is locked by user antimatter15@pygowave.p2k-network.org”. svg-edit (the latter) doesn’t support moving things after they’re created so it doesn’t really matter then, and I’m quite certain the former doesn’t do any type of locking.

And lets not forget the likely most important, yet totally untested feature that seperates VectorEditor from the rest: IE support, which is inherent since it uses Raphael for rendering, but it may not be necessary since google may be making some shim-type system of hacking svg awesomeness onto IE and making the whole VectorEditor project useless.

So if you want to try it out, go to pygowave, sign up, create a wave and add the

During the last two days I worked a bit on my cross platform, Raphael based vector graphics editor. It now supports Firefox, Opera, Chrome, probably Safari and magically, something called IE. Yes, it works on that nasty terror. Really, the project started with just the idea of being able to support IE. Sure it has a few neat features (multiple select mainly), but the fundamental idea is to support IE and to do so in a stable manner. It’s actually running quite well in IE, though only the latest version has been tested.

Among the updates is a new delete tool that is far more flexible and powerful. It is now not just a button but an entire tool. So while you can still click on it to delete your current selection, you can also use the tool to click on shapes or drag and delete whole groups (not sure what that thing is called). It even has a nice red tint to signify deleting. There is also event listening, vX support (it only uses events and position), and selecting fill, stroke, stroke opacity, fill opacity, and stroke width.

It also integrates well into the Ajax Animator in an almost drop-in replacement type. Maybe eventually something to choose between VectorEditor and Onlypaths. The really only bug features there are multiple select and drag and line editing.

Lines are now done almost perfectly. Dragging them works perfectly and it shows two little boxes on the ends that fan be dragged to edit. This vastly simplifies the old issues with lines and stick figures. Stick figures that inherently satisfy me a lot because that was the highes level of animation I ever did.

It’s probably a bad thing that the developer od an animation application never did anything more complex than stick figures, and probably makes it seem strange for me to even start it. But anyone with more knowledge of animation would not be so naiive as to attempt this.

http://jsvectoreditor.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/index.html

http://jsvectoreditor.googlecode.com/

There’s the project page! If you want to try it out, the link is below. It’s only been tested on Firefox 3.0 so far, and please comment if there are any issues.

http://jsvectoreditor.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/index.html

I was experiementing with using another framework for Vector editing. So I used the relatively new Raphael framework. I wanted to use dojo.gfx, but I still don’t know how to use it without the dojo dependency. Raphael is not as powerful as dojo.gfx, or even OnlyPaths… so, it needs work.

It has many of the features in OnlyPaths, but it keeps the core showTracker() and such functions in the main script, not in the renderer. That allows the system to be simpler, and more easily cross-platform.

I’m not currently using cross-platform event handling. so it only works in Firefox for now, but converting is easy.

http://antimatter15.110mb.com/ajaxanimator/VectorEditor/opr.htm