Korea Mozilla Community Party

I attended the Korea Mozilla Community Annual Party 2007 last week which was hosted by Channy.
Channy is the leader of KoMoCo, a contributor for localization of Firefox. Actually, his company, Daum has supported many open source communities including KoMoCo. So, I always thank for Daum and his efforts.

For more details, I'd like to share some blog articles regarding the party.

• KoMoCo Anual Pary Photos in Flickr
  
• Mozllia Japan Gen Kanai's introduction about KoMoKo anual party
• John’s Blog
  

Firefox3 beta1 & Cairo Graphics

As expected, Mozilla finally has started the beta test of Firefox3 after finished the alpha8 test. Actually, the official version of Firefox3 should have been released this time. However, the release date is behind the schedule as the alpha test was recently finished. Anyway, we expect that Firefox would be officially released in the first half of next year

The major feature of Firefox is to use Cairo as the graphic engine for rendering all of things. Cairo is designed to provide primitives for 2-dimensional drawing across a number of different backends
Firefox2 has only made use of Cairo in its Gecko layout engine for rendering SVG and Canvas.
However, all graphics rendering would be done through Cairo in Firefox3. The major reason of using Cairo is that SVG, Canvas, and font rendering need to use 2D vector drawing and it allows the drawing to be accelerated by GPU. In the future, Firefox is going to have the capabilities of drawing vector graphics as much as Flash so that it allows users to paint the Web in a standard way. We can already find out many examples of the future Web graphics when surfing the Web.
Click the following links for more details.

• Firefox3's new features for users
  
• Firefox3's enhanced technologies for developers
• Beta1 Release Notes

Firefox3's SVG Demo

I got a presentation on the future of firefox from the web

The slide introduced the coming features of firefox3 such as SVG, canvas3D, Offline and XMLHttpRequest++.

Actually, I am not sure that all features can be added to firefox3 because some features are very experimental. Anyway, I think SVG is very interesting among the new features.

SVG is a standard technology to create vector graphics on the web and even can be embedded in HTML pages

You can see a SVG demo using the foreignobject on the following page.

http://starkravingfinkle.org/blog/2007/07/firefox-3-svg-foreignobject/

What is the foreignobject?

The foreignobject can make any HTML tag to embed into SVG. It means that HTML tag can be worked as a primitive of SVG such as line, circle, and rectangle. So you can apply transform effect on HTML tag.

I think that SVG will be able to change a way of rendering the web in future.

2007 South-North Korean Summit

South Korean president Rho Moo-hyun and North Korean leader Kim Jeong-il had a historical summit meeting at Pyungyang in North Korea.

This is the second summit between the two Koreas.

During the summit, Two leaders had several talks about Korean peace, economic investment, reunification on North Korea.

I wish that the two Koreas could archive piece and prosperity on the Korean Peninsula.

Flickr Launching Party at Seoul

Flickr Launching Party at Seoul, originally uploaded by joone4u.

I attended Flickr Launching Party at Seoul.

Anyone couldn't attend the party, only invited users could attend the party.
Actually I have used Flickr for 1 year. so I have uploaded many beautiful photos on Flickr.

Anyway, it was a very enjoyable party that offered games, cocktail show, and quiz.

Introduction to Mozilla based web browsers

We are using Firefox browser that has been developed by Mozilla. As you may know, Firefox is based on the Mozilla application framework that provides a good way of supporting cross-platform for running applications.

However, supporting cross-platform has some weak points. The first weak point is performance, the second is that it can not utilize the native user interface.

Some web browsers are based on the Mozilla application framework with a native user interface. So they are tightly integrated into the specific platform such as Windows, Mac, and Gnome Desktop to provide their own look and feel. But they are still based on the technology of the Mozilla application framework such as the component model and the 2D layout engine.

These are good examples:

• Camino is a web browser for Mac OSX based on Mozilla’s Gecko layout engine using Cocoa framework.
• Galeon is a web browser for GNOME based on Mozilla's Gecko layout engine.
• K-Meleon uses native Windows API to create the user interface (instead of using Mozilla's cross-platform XUL layer), and as a result, is tightly integrated into the look and feel of the Windows desktop.

There is another kind of Mozilla based web browser. That is Flock.

• Flock is a special web browser that offers some famous web service such as flickr viewer, blog uploader, and RSS Reader.

You can choose any web browser depends on your taste.

The change of Apple Inc.

Apple had leaded the personal computer market until the beginning of 80s before IBM released the IBM-PC. Apple also created new personal computer, the Macintosh that provides the GUI firstly. It was very innovative.
However, IBM-PC had become the mainstream of the personal computer. IBM opened the architecture of the computer and many computer manufacturers could make compatible IBM-PCs. Microsoft provided a DOS & Windows as an OS for the PCs. It was not innovative and easy to use, but it was cheaper than the Macintosh.

The Macintosh is very popular to designers, students and teachers. But it is insufficient to become a mainstream of personal computer. Apple has still fewer than 10% of the market share of personal computer. Most of PC is now using Microsoft Windows.
Now, it is not important issue, because Apple is not just a computer manufacturer any more. Apple changed their business way now to be an electric consumer company like SONY, SAMSUNG. The success of iPod can make Apple changed.

I am looking foward to activities of Apple from now on.