One Shot Design

Having had the undisputed strongest foothold in the business market until this year with its Blackberry smartphones, Canadian company RIM has been busy working on a touch-screen device that will be released in a couple of weeks.

At the moment, Apple doesn’t offer an all round solution of messaging server and client like RIM does; but never in the history of telecomunications had a handset maker been able to dictate conditions to a network carrier like AT&T: Apple asked for modifications to existing networks to enable “visual voicemail”, a 10% of iPhone sales in AT&T stores and 5 years of exclusivity.

Given the overwhelming success of the iPhone, which sales have now topped that of Blackberries, and the (tightly controlled) growing number of iPhone application, RIM has more than one thing to be worrying about. Yahoo recently released Zimbra, a server & client suite that supports the iPhone.

HostExploit.com published a research report compiled by an group of mostly anonymous researchers. The report blames the proliferation of spam on loose regulating by Internet providers. Hurricane Electric Internet Services and Global Crossing Ltd., both mentionned in the report, took immediate measures to limit the activity of servers from McColo Corp, a company renting servers and reportedly allowing its customers to control vast arrays of hijacked computers, send spam and cash payments for fake anti-virus software.

As a consequence, a drop of 2/3 in Spam traffic has been observed. That is until spammers move to new ill-regulated rented servers.

I’ve been working almost exclusively with Inkscape for the last 14 months. Version 0.46 now does a remarkable job at importing Adobe’s native AI and PDF, and exporting PDF’s. The AI format is still proprietary, but in July 2008, Adobe’s Portable Document Format became an ISO Open Standard, meaning that it is publicly available and that it can be implemented in applications for free.

For the sake of corporate compatibility, I am still designing my presentation layouts on Illustrator to save them in PDF, but I have to admit that Inkscape definitely rocks when it comes to flexibility. The SVG’s Alpha Transparency allows me to reach better coloud fading effects and I find Inkscape much faster in processing shapes with quantities of nodes in the three zeroes figures.