state of ivtools

[Scott J. <sc...@ac...>]

Greetings to everyone on the ivtools-devel mailing list,

Development of ivtools has been slow (yet steady) for the past year
and a half since I took a full-time job as a software engineer in the
video broadcast industry.  Now with the advent of 1.0 there is some
indication this might change, as a wider audience of users and potential

developers give ivtools a try.

ivtools now compiles with both gcc-2.95.* and gcc-3.0.*, links against
both libstdc++-v2 and libstdc++-v2, and works on a variety of
platforms:  every Linux, FreeBSD, NetBSD, a host of older Unix'es,
Cygwin on Windows, and most likely Mac OS X in the near future.

As always, the basic capability of idraw has been preserved, and from
time to time ancient bugs are fixed, or extensions are made to the idraw

format.

On top of idraw is the layering of frameworks that augment idraw with
additional mechanism of potential interest to application developers.
The layering is such that you can grab just the amount of layers you
need for vertical application, and start building on top of that subset
without having to master the whole stack.  And in the future you can
still slip other layers underneath your application as needed.

But frankly, I'm not aware of anyone making use of ivtools in this
manner at present.  Although it is a unique result of interest to
computer scientists, most end-user applications written in the
world of free software are monolithic point applications.

So why not make our own stand-alone applications, tuned to appeal
to a given audience?  Of course, this being ivtools, I would like to
suggest more than one.

The first focus is a simple, youth-friendly vector-graphics editor
that builds on the easy-to-use interface of idraw (as opposed to
the competition which starts with the goal of cloning Illustrator).
What if Apple was shipping a vector-graphic drawing editor with
MacOS X to complement iTunes, iMovie, etc.? That's right, think
iDraw!  In ivtools, iDraw (with a capital D) would be an evolution
of drawtool, either in-place or on-top.  It would remain a simple
editor, perhaps even simpler than it is today, yet full-featured in
a way that would please a parent who makes their living using
professional graphical editing tools.

The second focus is complex and leading-edge, the evolution
of drawserv to live up to its name, whatever that entails.  Imagine
a server for group creation,  transformation,  and publishing of
vector-graphics.  Imagine sketching out a storyboard with
other artists working in parallel, with all the support necessary
for committing and reversing changes to the master copy, with
the freedom to branch your effort at anytime.  Imagine hierarchical
structured graphics composed of hyperlinked fragments with
arbitrary transformations to coordinates and graphic state.
Imagine putting such a tool in the hands of college students
bored with textual hyperlinks and web-based chat-rooms.

There are a variety of  tasks ahead of us before either promise
is even partially fulfilled.  Yet no other software package is
as well positioned to do both, with an iceberge of capability
lurking beneath the current user interface on the surface.  Ask
questions here to increase your understanding of what to do,
and how to do it.  Volunteer for what you can, get others
to volunteer for the rest.

Scott Johnston
http://www.ivtools.org

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