Something positive to say about #Apple

Apple is innovative, it routinely adds new functionality and quality to its products. Many people love Apple products and pay a healthy premium for the latest and greatest.

One of the recent innovations goes by the name of "retina display". It is a high resolution screen of such quality that the human eye does no longer see individual pixels. Innovations like the retina display add demand for high quality images and, it does stimulate the use of high quality images and the use of SVG or scalable vector graphics in WMF projects like Commons and Wikipedia.

The improved technology used in Apple hardware stimulates quality improvements at content providers. In this way Apple stimulates a healthy and innovating content ecosystem. As other hardware suppliers are continuously catching up with the leader of the pack, there is real value in buying Apple.

I did  it, nothing negative to read in this post about Apple.
Thanks,
        GerardM

MobileFrontend is #MediaWiki release 1.17

The  #mobile gateway has been replaced and it is running live. What is relevant is, that Wikipedia runs MediaWiki release 1.17. This is a patched version of the official release but it is release 1.17.

This factoid is relevant for people running their own MediaWiki project. It is more then likely that they can benefit from native support for mobile phones as well. When you consider how fast mobile traffic of Wikipedia is growing, it is a potential boon for any and all MediaWiki projects. It starts with installing the MobileFrontend extension and there may be some configuration issues to tackle as well.

We may all have wish lists for improved support for mobile phones. What I would like to see is something like the Djatoka software . I blogged about Djatoka in March 2010 however there are other similar solutions. It only sends images sized to fit on a screen. Given the cost of mobile bandwidth, it would be a money saver for our readers.
Thanks,
       GerardM

Who knew #SVG supports #WebFonts

On #Commons Scalable Vector Graphics are the preferred format for graphics. The big advantage is that a SVG can be scaled up and down without losing any resolution.

As SVG has an XML definition, the aspects of an image are defined in text and need to be rendered. As text labels can be defined, it is possible to replace the text with text in another language and in other scripts.

When an image is to be rendered, the font needs to be present at some stage. This can achieved by having them locally, by having them present as a web font or by converting the text to graphics.

For many languages with Wikimedia projects we cannot rely on the presence of fonts that adequately show text. The WebFonts extension is to provide a solution for this. The software makes use of freely licensed fonts. These same fonts can be used to support server based SVG rendering.

One issue may be the complex scripts with diacritics like Indic languages or Hebrew. At SILPA there is an experimental tool that converts any text not only to PDF but also to SVG.

As the SVG technology has matured, it is time to review bugs like Bug 8898, Bug 10501 and Bug 21497. It may even be time to consider the use of animated SVG, something we do not do because of the backwards support for old browsers.
Thanks,
       GerardM

Hopes are up for #Toolserver II

No tool is more appropriate then "#SVG translate" to be the first of the Toolserver tools to be internationalised. This tool that has been around for quite some time and was recently adopted by Jarry1250. He came to #mediawiki-i18n to learn how to get localisations for this tool.

One of the things that is quite nifty is that it does not only enable translations for the SVG files at Commons, you can also translate files from other websites.

With Jarry1250 and Krinkle setting up the internationalisation for Toolserver tools, the functionality of SVG Translate got attention as well. The image that has its labels translated is now shown together with the labels that need translation.

There is some Dutch in this screen shot :)

With the usability improvements and the accessibility improvements SVG translate has the potential to become a tool that will seriously support the use of SVG in all the Wikimedia projects. A tool like this unlocks an potential that has been inherently present all the time.
Thanks,
      GerardM