Some Random Thoughts

In the "what planet are their lawyers on" category, I noticed an article on CNN/Money about how Microsoft is preparing to make upgrades contingent upon being able to prove that your version of a given Microsoft product is legitimate. Okay, I`m picking myself off the floor after fainting in shock and astonishment. Microsoft pays their lawyers a lot of money - perhaps far more than they deserve.
Let`s think about the potential scenarios here:

Pirates make copies of Windows available for $10. This service goes into play, the pirates get the upgrades and drop them onto a new disk, and sell the disk for an additional $10 bucks. The pirates actually make MORE money off this process, because of course they now get to sell the upgrades as well.

KDE 3.4 SVG WallPaper Contest Winners
SVG is continuing to come on strong on the Linux side. KDE has been integrating support for SVG into their operating system for some time, and will be supporting SVG wallpapers in their 3.4 version. This to me is really almost entirely too cool -- consider a web service (or software generator) that can spit out SVG whenever invoked, which means that your wallpaper, in addition to (eventually) being animated, can change to reflect the time of day, the current weather, web traffic, or anything else you wanted. Yes, its eye candy, but we all need a little eye candy now and again, and if it promotes the power of SVG, more power to it.
A couple of days ago the KDE team announced their winners, all of which will be featured as part of the KDE 3.4 release. The first prize winner, "We are Gear" by gg3po, is a stunning piece of artwork that both captures the gear motif of KDE and shows that SVG is able to create incredible art as well as functional illustrations. If you think that SVG is only good for building graphs and maps, check out the winners (and the entrants in general) - you`ll be blown away.
Stylus Studio XML Editor Professional v. 6 Released

Stylus Studio has released the next generation of their XML Editor, a full functioned XML editor starting at $495. Aimed at the web services and ebXML crowd, Stylus Studio includes such nice to have features as an XSLT 2 transformer, a DTD editor, an XQuery editor, better integration for both .NET and Java integration, mapping tools for both XQuery and XSLT, web services integration, and support for many OASIS business standards.
I`ve just begun evaluating it, and hope to come out with a complete report about the suite later this month, when I do my XML Editor Shakedown - in which I hope to pit the various XML editors head to head and see which ones are standing at the end of the day. (One of the few good things about not getting paid to write this is that I can be completely objective and as nasty as I want when it comes to reviews ...)
Of Inkscape and Scribus

Inkscape, a remarkably capable SVG editor, and Scribus, a similarly capable desktop publishing solution, are open source projects out of the UK that have been ongoing for quite a while, and like a number of similar OSS efforts they are beginning to develop into truly powerful and stable applications.
I actually use Inkscape for the generation of icons and related resources, as well as for setting up the original graphics layer for more sophisticated SVG applications. Currently, it supports most of the static features of SVG, including the use of gradients, masks and patterns, but it doesn`t yet support filters (okay, I`d like to see the Gaussian filter, but that`s about the only one I really miss). It can save output in a number of different formats, including enhanced SVG 1.1 with extensions, pure SVG, EPS, PDF and other vector graphics formats, and has a decent rasterizer for creating 32 bit PNG files with transparency (something I use extensively). It also has a very good bitmap tracer, which I find helpful when I want to turn a drawing I`ve done manually into a more finished vector product.
Scribus has aims in a different area - producing a useful open-source desktop publishing program. The desktop publishing arena reached its heyday in the early 1990s, but after that it`s become something of a backwater, without a huge amount of real innovation going on and with most decent DTP applications running $500 or more. Thus, an OSS desktop publishing app could very well serve to seriously shake up the industry, especially as we seem to be entering into what I`m thinking may be the second wave of electronic publishing.
Scribus is Linux only (unlike Inkscape), but as Linux based DTPs are rare, it`s beginning to make its presence felt in shops that have gone to Linux for other reasons but have had to stay in Windows or the Macintosh for their layout tools. Most recently, it scored a couple of firsts in its relatively short life - it was used for laying out a professionally authored book ( Canal Francais, about the efforts to create the Panama canal in the 1880s), and is being used to lay out a couple of different European newspapers.
In addition to a Pagemaker like interface, Scribus includes support for importing both bitmap and vector graphics (including those generated by Inkscape) as well as providing export capability to SVG and PDF, a filter for importing Open Office documents, a Python scripter, and a host of other features. The PDF export is especially impressive, as it`s geared toward pre-press output rather than simply formatted text layout, as well as support for PDF forms and Javascript. SVG export is also a big plus, especially as SVG enters more into the presentation side of things.
Wrap-up

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