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Major Step Forward For SVG in the Desktop
Ur@eus writes "SVG the w3c format for Scalable Vector Graphics is seen as many as the future of desktop icons as it allows for scaling icons etc. without loss of quality. Dominic Lachowicz has been working hard on fixing bugs in librsvg over the last few days. The result is that librsvg now renders all available SVG icons perfectly.
Not only do it render them, but it renders them faster than libpng renders the same images in png format.
Together with the gdkpixbuf plugin librsvg offer it means GNOME 2.2 will be able to use SVG images not only for icons or desktop backgrounds, but also for the GUI widgets themselves and the graphics of the window manager.
Dom's announcement can be found on the librsvg mailinglist. The librsvg site also offer a GNOME 2.2 metatheme using mostly SVG icons including a nice screenshot."
Great work librsvg team!!! I look forward to the day when there is no more Flash because SVG is so well supported. SVG: XML based, open standard, w3c backed, blah, blah. I love it! SVG is the ISH!
Also, the more it will be used, the faster it will hopefully become available in browsers out of the box so we can finally ditch flash...
Icons are only a small part of what SVG Graphics are about. However being the most common images used on the desktop it is a logical starting point for SVG graphics.
However the entire quartz graphics subsystem supports all sorts of vector based operations and translations. Its a lot of fun to play with. Look at all of the shrunken window effects.
-- Oh Well
And I want mine to be the same size regardless of my screen resolution. So I'll be happy and you can still use bitmaps.
Bloody hell - there is "the glass is half empty" and then there's "I hate glasses and really don't see what use they are to me or the rest of the planet".
Carpe Daemon
You seem to be under the impression that the OSX-icons are SVG. This is not true. They are just resource forks containing several different sized icons so that they seem to scale "magically".
They might be drawn with Vector based drawing, but they ARE converted before used as icons. KDE does the same thing. The excellent Crystal Icons are SVG-based, but they are converted to PNG for KDE, hence the incorrect assumption that KDE supports SVG. KDE is supposed to get SVG-support in KDE 3.2.
I am not your aunt Tilly people!
"Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge"
- Charles Darwin
Covers everything at this time. Max resolutions have gone up year on year, but most people don't use the full capabilities of their card/monitor because the screen elements become too small. So having a resolution independant desktop would be a good way of solving that issue (though obviously you still get these issues with the web).
It's a step towards what we should have had long ago: a desktop where you don't need to know what resolution it's running at, things are just scaled to the correct size. It's crazy that changing to a higher resolution display (eg from 800x600 to 1024x768 on the same monitor) makes all the window decorations and icons smaller. Fonts are supposed to remain the same size, but often they don't.
Obviously for really low resolutions the scale might need to be increased to keep things readable, but a 3200x2400 desktop should look identical to 800x600 except for increased sharpness and detail. (You can still choose really tiny icons if you want them, of course.)
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
I'm surprised no one has mentioned a key benefit of SVG desktops: session migration.
Ever notice how primitive systems like WinXX have some serious layout problems with a network login user moving from their "usual" 1280x1024 desktop to a temporary workstation that is set for 800x600? The icons get repositioned to be visible, destroying any custom layout the user had -- and that is assuming they were all in the upper/left of the screen. Heaven forbid the user had bothered with placing any of them on the right hand edge of their screen!
Deploying a "thin client" desktop is even worse, as you need to be able to scale the virtual desktop to fit the physical screen being used at the time. As PCs become more innocuous (think payphones), it will be natural for people to expect to have an identical session no matter what they are using to link with their home server session.
Sure we're still 5-10 years from the point where those facilities are "needed", but without a solid foundation in place we can't even think about deploying those kind of systems efficiently.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
I'm a little ahead of the baby boom, so my eyes are a little worse than those of most people, but they are catching up. This is something that is long overdue and will be most valuable or just about essential as the demographic bulge moves into its later years. We can't go on creating every UI like it was designed by a 22-year-old with no idea that vision doesn't deteriorate for some of us. It's just about criminal that if you are having trouble reading the screen and go out and buy a better, higher-resolution monitor, everything gets harder to read.