NEW GRAPHICS TOOLKIT FOR POCKET PCS

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NEW GRAPHICS TOOLKIT FOR POCKET PCS
28 February 2002 - CSIRO

Great graphics for electronic books, interactive electronic street directories for tourists, and a new way to deliver detailed engineering drawings in the field are just three applications that are now a step closer to the market place.

CSIRO has released the commercial version of PocketSVG, a developers' toolkit for using Scalable Vector Graphics on Pocket PCs. It is available online at www.pocketsvg.com.

Pocket SVG brings accurate, sharp, high quality images to pocket computing devices, enabling quality graphics viewing. It is the ideal software for the development of mobile applications that require graphics.

"The beta release of PocketSVG last year was highly successful and generated significant interest from developers. The current version is a full commercial release which means that PocketSVG is ready to start building applications with," says senior computer scientist at CSIRO, Ross Ackland.

PocketSVG is based on the World Wide Web Consortium (www.W3C.org) standard for delivering and presenting graphic and image data on the Internet and is quickly becoming the industry standard for web based vector graphics.

"We are committed to the development of technologies that will enable application of SVG," says Dean Jackson, CSIRO scientist and member of the W3C working group. "At CSIRO we have delivered a world first - software to view image and vector data on portable devices based on the SVG standard."

SVG, which is based on XML (the now widely accepted industry standard for web based documents) can be used as an alternative to bit-map graphic formats such as gif and jpeg which do not perform well on mobile devices.

"SVG is an excellent graphics format for mobile devices. It provides high quality graphics that you can pan and zoom without losing image quality. It also supports advanced features such as user interaction, animation and scripting," says Mr Jackson.

Pocket SVG is a component technology tailored for pocket PCs. It is the only commercially available software that makes this new standard of high-quality graphics available on WinCE based handheld devices.

"PocketSVG provides the basic functionality that developers will need to create SVG-based applications, and will conform to the newly emerging SVG 1.1 mobile profile for portable devices," says Mr Ackland.

PocketSVG is available to individual users as a plug-in module for Pocket PC browsers and to application developers as a component package for creating applications.

http://www.csiro.au

About: CSIRO
CSIRO is Australia's Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation.

As one of the world's largest and most diverse scientific global research organisations, work touches every aspect of Australian life: from the molecules that build life to the molecules in space.

Working from sites across the nation and around the globe, our 6500 staff are focussed on providing new ways to improve quality of life, as well as the economic and social performance of a number of industry sectors, through research and development.

These sectors are:

Agribusiness
Energy and Transport
Environment and Natural Resources
Health
Information, Communication and Services
Manufacturing
Mineral Resources

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