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I have been searching for SVG-Tiny compatible software (neither Inkscape, corelDraw, Illustrator, Freehand, Flash or any of the other major packages support SVG-Tiny) for a while and found the following two:

Beatware - http://www.beatware.com/products/md.html
Ikivo Animator - http://ikivo.com/

I don't think Beatware is quite up-to-beat, but it has some nice SVG profiling features (SVG-Tiny 1.0, 1.1, 1.1+ etc.)

I would LOVE for SVG-Tiny to appear in Inkscape as it is well on its way to beat the commercial packages.

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Beatware Mobile Designer

Ikivo Animator

SVG smartphones shipping now.

Instead, SVG seems to have a better future. And the right tools are HERE:

http://www.beatware.com/products/md_golive.html

e-Picture Pro is a quick sketch program that outputs SVG (and SVGT for mobile devices)

The work I am doing with the Linux Quality Database is inspired in large part by a desire to bring this kind of quality to Open Source and Free Software systems. I use Linux on a daily basis in my own work now but honestly my experience of it wears me down and I fell so... refreshed whenever I restart into the BeOS.

But it is clear to me that Be, Inc.'s troubles are due to lack of wisdom and commitment among its management despite the best efforts of its engineers. From the start, Be made very little effort to market to the public, even though anyone who ever tried the BeOS immediately liked it and usually wanted to run it on their machine.

After a while it became clear that Be had problems keeping its commitments to its developers. I lost out on a lot of evenings and weekends spent developing a product that didn't sell well when I could have developed another product for the Mac OS - I was well into one for the Mac but gave it up for the BeOS. The investors who funded BeatWare and Adamation lost millions of dollars on their BeOS development efforts; the companies were only saved when they ported their products to the Mac OS and Windows.

Read about my observations about the difficulties that a number of companies have had surviving in the turbulent world of High-Tech, including my advice as to why business partnerships with Be are best avoided:

• The Valley is a Harsh Mistress

• Freeing the Developer from OS Vendor Shackles

• Some of Us Work for a Living

Be dug their own grave. If someone comes to their rescue with new funding, I'd like to suggest that the package include a new top-level management team with a mandate to shake things up. Firing the sales-prevention team would help.

I'll be sad if the BeOS dies and I hope they do open source it. It is likely that it uses licensed technology so that they could not legally open source the whole thing; let us hope they take the route netscape did and remove the proprietary parts and allow the open sourcing of the rest, rather than allowing it to die.

Mike

After years of silver-tongued promises of support from Be for such things as marketing support for developers, Be never effectively marketed it's own BeOS desktop operating system and then announced that it was ceasing development of it, except to the extent necessary to support it's development of the BeIA internet appliance platform.

This means, for example, that the current rev of the BeOS won't install on my PC because I use an Ultra160 SCSI controller - Be doesn't see these as necessary for support of it's development platform.

And you can forget about marketing support for those of use who listened to Be's promises and actually shipped commercial products for the BeOS.

While I may have lost a lot of time and effort coding spellcheckers that could have been better spent elsewhere, Be developers BeatWare and Adamation lost millions, and are only able to survive because they ported to Windows or Mac.

My essential point is that Be is not to be trusted by Sony when times get difficult for it. There was a time when folks like me, Adamation and Beatware were all Be had. If Be can screw us, why can't they screw Sony?

Michael D. Crawford
GoingWare Inc

Rather than take advantage of my work to bring this protocol to the BeOS - it is an open protocol and allows any text service to be linked to an email client, not just spellchecking - Be instead wrote their own spellchecker for email.

The only other email client to implement Word Services on the BeOS, Mail-It from BeatWare became a free product after BeatWare abandoned the BeOS market and ported their ePicture graphics editor to Mac and Windows where it is selling very well.

If you don't think I have good reason to be pissed at Be, why don't you ask Marc Verstaen, the President of Beatware, what he thinks of Be after he and a group of investors wasted several million dollars developing desktop software for the BeOS?

There were only a few substantial commercial companies solely devoted to BeOS development and Beatware was one of the best. Now they are a Mac and Windows shop.

• Completely GUI configuration, no scripts or text files to edit
• Use ISP/hosting service mail servers simply by entering POP and SMTP servers in the preferences
• critically importanthandle multiple email accounts from multiple servers and domains
• Be able to switch email accounts without quitting the program. Eudora for windows or mac can use multiple accounts but you have to quit and start it up with a different config file
• Able to select the "From:" address with a popup menu (and have the right SMTP server used)? This is particularly important to be able to do in replies when I want to reply from a different address than it was sent to
• No configuration of sendmail or any other mail software on my linux box required.
• Arbitrary and unlimited numbers of mail filters, that sort into:
• Unlimited numbers of mailboxes
• Scales to handle tens of thousand of letters in a mailbox, with the ability to search various ways (both in headers and body text) and to sort by header fields

KMail with KDE lets you use POP and SMTP providers but only works with one account.

If anyone knows of a good mail client that will serve my needs as described on Linux I will gladly switch.

• Applications. Yes, there is no Microsoft Office for BeOS. But that has let interesting little companies such as GoBe and BeatWare produce genuinely innovative products at very low prices. There are at least two companies producing professional-level video editing systems for the BeOS. With Be's ability to produce astonishing multi-media performance compared to NT or MacOS, I think this is an exceptional opportunity for the hapless consumer, burdened with poor-quality Windows products in the video editing space, to use a worthwhile and cost-effective solution.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
• Loyalty. Those who use BeOS love it with similar fervor to OS/2, Amiga, Linux and Mac users. The main thing that sets BeOS apart is that it's designed to co-exist with Windows, so you don't have to give up your Windows to use BeOS. It's a lot like Microsoft's oh-so-successful transition between DOS and Windows - you could ignore Windows, but when you wanted to use it, it was there. At $ 69.99, BeOS is an impulse purchase, just like Red Hat Linux without the complex installation. No hefty investment in additional hardware needed, which I think is key to its success.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
• Quality. Like Linux, BeOS is rock solid. It stays up. Unlike Linux, it has a coherent GUI that's slick, easy to learn and consistent. It was designed from the ground up to run well on any hardware, but to take advantage of multi-processing when available. Also unlike Linux, downloading and installing commercial applications is very slick and smooth.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
• Installation ease. If your hardware is supported - and it's looking pretty good for new PCs - BeOS is trivial to install. Put the CD in the drive, boot, answer a question about partition size (well explained in the manual), and you're off.