Late Night PC

Candace has an issue with booth babes, and she's called me out.

I know Rob is going to say that taking the boothbabes out of E3 takes the fun out of the conference - but is that what you really think? Really really? Do you really believe it’s justified to use a woman’s body to sell a game? Would you want your daughter working there?

The daughter card? Right out of the gate? Isn't that something like the thing about losing a thread by comparing the other party to Hitler? I'll go remind her not to stick candy in her butt. Anyhow, let me say that I don't go to E3 for the booth babes. They're definitely part of the show and I don't try to pretend they're not there either. I don't think losing them would take the fun out of the conference, but when you take away a feature that's enjoyable then, yeah, that takes some fun away. I'm not going to appologize to anyone for being intrigued by attractive women - after all, isn't that why models are used in advertising? Because they attract attention?

Introducing Get SVG. I've been working on and off over the past few months on a site around SVG advocacy as well as helping users with SVG who may just be looking at SVG as a means to an end. I think that there are enough applications of SVG and implementations of SVG renderers out there now that there's a need for a site like this. Those of us that are really interested in SVG are playing with it and some people are interested enough to actually deliver applications to users. Since the users of these applications may or may not care what SVG is, they'll need a place to look for help when things don't go as they expect. That's one crowd. When applications support SVG as an input or output format, it's often just one in a list of exports. Adobe Illustrator is one example of this. Apparently some versions of Visio have it too. More and more applications will offer this option, especially as the libraries they're built on continue to make SVG export easier. Since the feature is only a minor one for that application, there's not necessarily a lot of information in their documentation about the internals of the SVG file produced. Advanced users come in to cases where they want to do things, sometimes odd things, with these exported SVG files. These advanced users make up a second crowd. Some users are working with Inkscape because it's a great free vector drawing tool. Other users benefit from the SVG capabilities in the Gimp or ImageMagick. They're not SVG developers, they're artists. They have questions, experiences and interests. These people are a third crowd. Finally there are the more obvious groups of people who develop in PHP, ASP, Java or Javascript and have language-specific questions about SVG or the popular SVG libraries that they're using. This crowd is definitely important too (and I count myself primarily here as well). I'm inviting all these crowds to come and get involved in the discussion at Get SVG. It's early yet, but the sooner you get there, the better seat you'll have.