Image creation/manipulation is an essential part of UI design and, with Photoshop gone, GIMP and Inkscape came to the rescue. Almost all graphics used in the Apollo-NG realm are created with Inkscape. With many people already using Inkscape and it being a vector oriented tool creating SVGs, it was just a matter of time until the SVG standard and its implementations matured and spread. Some features, such as SMIL animation and SVG Fonts are not as widely supported. There are many SVG authoring tools, and export to SVG is supported by all major vector graphics authoring tools.

SVG 2 is currently under development, and will add new ease-of-use features to SVG, as well as more closely integrating with HTML, CSS, and the DOM, and deprecating features not supported by all browsers. The SVG Working Group is currently working in parallel on a set of modules for extending prior specifications and adding functionality to CSS, and the new SVG 2 specification will combine those modules with the rest of the SVG framework to work across the full range of devices and platforms.

Let's see about bypassing even Inkscape and learn with a simple real-world example about programming UI elements directly, as opposed to manually drawing in Inkscape and thereby giving our code the means to control the design itself, making another step towards better SDUI.

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