Decent SVG on MacOS X?

Posted on Mon 29 December 2003
We're on vacation near Paris at my parents-in-law's. Family Christmas, sight-seeing in Paris, and... they have a nice PowerMac (dual 1GHz G4) running Panther!

I rushed on this jewel as soon as we arrived to see if all I need to work is available there. I want some meat to convince people that switching to a Mac is possible.

Wow, MacOS X is so cool and usable... Let's look at the tools I need. A browser: there are plenty. A JDK: 1.4.1 is builtin (and I have the impression that the JVM process is pooled and shared between programs). Eclipse: runs smoothly. An XML editor: JEdit is good. Running Cocoon: no problem.

Now let's try SVG. We use it a lot at work for highly graphical and interactive GUIs. The Adobe viewer is available and works with all browsers, which isn't the case on Windows.

But... but... there's no communication between the SVG drawing and the hosting HTML page!!! It's not possible to modify the SVG document or call one of its scripts from the enclosing document. Googling around confirmed it.

Poof... Bye-bye, sophisticated GUIs. Bye-bye, expected switch :-(

...unless Adobe releases the new version of their viewer on MacOS soon, or someone knows a nice trick to make it work...



I want a Mac!!!

Happy new year!