Thanks to Google’s Summer of Code an Open Source project is bringing up the best SVG editor I’ve seen so far – Inkscape. Since I’m not doing very artistic work in SVG I can’t comment those features. We are drawing maps and trying to make them usable online with the help of SVG (c.f. my ArcGIS SVG export macro). It’s a rather technical approach and for that reason I really appreciate the possibility to see the graphics (well, of course the visual work is vital as well) and browse/edit the XML tree at once.
As you can read in their FAQ Inkscape is not supposed to be a replacement for any big commercial vector graphics editor like Adobe Illustrator or Macromedia (Adobe) Freehand. But when it comes to SVG Inkscape is playing in the same league along with them.
Keep up the great work!
Monthly Archive for July, 2005
Because I wanted to show/share the pictures from my trip to spain with a few other people I registered to flickr. A pretty good service for publishing pictures online, fits perfect for my needs. It’s easy to use, iPhoto exports smoothly to it and one can personalize photos with notes, comments, etc. Altogether a successful service.
But since a major part in flickr are it’s community features – you publish your pictures to everyone and everyone can interact with them – it wakes up the little voyeuristic monster in you. I could spend hours browsing through “everyone’s photos”, watching some holiday pictures from argentina, cat pix from asia, artistic photographs from england, party pix from sidney… One must be careful with flickr, it’s addictive!
After more than 2 years suffering without real holidays I spent the last 3 weeks in
.
It was so good to see all the people again who I know from my ERASMUS year there in Madrid. Unfortunately the one week I spent in Madrid passed by way too fast. It’s a pity that I couldn’t meet everyone like I thought. I just have to visit Madrid más a menudo 
Because the weather in Madrid during Jul/Aug is horrible (hot like in hell) I went up to the north, to Galicia.
WHAT AN AMAZING PROVINCE! The atlantic offers wonderful deserted beaches, it’s not as hot like in the rest of Spain, you find a beautiful undulating green landscape between lovely historic cities. Somehow Galicia has a kind of mystic atmosphere. Maybe it’s produced by all the historic buildings up there, the feeling of the celtic roots of that part of Spain, or because you’ll find the end of the world in Galicia. It’s simply wonderful, highly recommended and for sure I’ll go there again.
The third week I spent at the International Cartographic Conference in La Coruña. Highly interesting too see what’s going on around the world and where we are standing in Austria. Well, after negotiations concerning geodata policy have stopped here and there is no hope that the responsible parties will come to an agreement without having pressure from EU/INSPIRE or our government (which obviously is not interested in geodata policy), you come to the conclusion that Austria is still a developing country regarding NSDIs. Attending a few international presentations about NSDIs, I saw that we are at least 5 years behind the development of most (european) countries. Especially the initiatives in Spain surprised me and I was pretty impressed how things are working there. But in general is the ICA too academic and has therefore a too scientific approach for me.