Forthcoming AIR application updates

Along with the new e2publish (online publishing AIR application), I’ll also be releasing updates to e2spreadsheet and e2vector soon.

The next version of e2spreadsheet has:-

1. New, powerful OLAP totals feature.

2. More powerful cell formatting.  Choose currency symbol and number of decimals.

3. Choose number of frequency bins for frequency graph.

4. AVERAGE(), ABS(), ROUND(), TRUNC(), MIN() and MAX() functions added to formula language.

5. Cosmetic changes and a side-palette.

6. Undo graph palette position/resize bug fixed.

7. Append .e2s extension on files.

8. Other minor bug fixes and improvements.

The next version of e2vector has:-

1. A new brush tool!

2. Import and export FXG files – meaning that you can transfer illustrations to and from Flash!

3. Undo pen tool drawing bug fixed.

4. Other bug fixes and improvements.

The overall plans is to make these client AIR applications stable and powerful.  Next I’ll write the server-side stuff to allow users to collaborate and share documents.

I’ll announce when all these updates are available here or on twitter.

Adobe’s restrictive font licensing rules

Some of the features that I described in my video tour of e2publish won’t be making their way into the first release.  Adobe’s font licensing is just too restrictive.

It looks like ligature, digit case and digit width only have an effect on certain fonts.  But there are licensing issues with those fonts.  Adobe sells five user licenses for US$29 or US$35 per font.

Five user license?  What does this mean in a networked collaborative online context?

Well, according to Adobe this licensing model is VERY restrictive.  Too restrictive for online use.

“You may not use the fonts on any internet or web-hosted service outside of your internal network”

This means that Adobe’s guided tour of the Text Layout Framework is somewhat misleading.  Because technically, you wouldn’t be allowed to make your own website or collaborative application using fonts like Selentium Pro.

Adobe can do it – because they’re obviously exempt from their own licensing conditions.  But for anyone else – it would be technically illegal.

So it seems like Adobe’s heavy-handed legal shackles are restricting our potential to really fly with the technology.

Clearly, Adobe need to think about this.  (I’m not holding my breath.)

How should Adobe monetise the online use of its fonts?  There is a licensing model for Monotype fonts that they may want to look at.

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I don’t twitter often because software development doesn’t lend itself to commentary.  Coding is esoteric.  An internal mental process not easily shared with others.  I’ve lost many subscribers due to my inactivity.  However, whenever I have something important to say, or an announcement or new release of an e2application – I’ll twitter it.  So if you’d like to be alerted about the public beta test of e2publish – you can subscribe to my twitter or this blog.