A preview of Sozi 14 is available for testers

Sozi 14 was officially announced last February. As the version number suggests, it was planned to be released in 2014. So I believe it is time to ship, at least, a preview of the new editor before the end of the year.

Until version 13.11, the editor for Sozi was provided as an Inkscape extension. The extension system of Inkscape had not been designed for this kind of use, so Sozi was not well integrated in Inkscape and the overall user experience was poor. Moreover, the editor depended on several other frameworks and libraries (Python 2.7, GTK2, PyGTK) that needed to be manually installed in Windows and OS X. Some of them are now deprecated. For all these reasons, I decided that it would be a waste of time to try to improve this editor again, and I started writing a new one from scratch. The editor for Sozi 14 has been developed with the following concerns:

A new user interface

Frames are created and modified using three panes:

It is no longer required to draw rectangles to delimit frames but it can help in some cases. Tutorials on this topic will be published soon.

There is no Save button. The editor saves the current document automatically, each time the window loses focus, and before quitting. If you modify the SVG document while Sozi is running, it will be reloaded automatically when Sozi gets the focus again.

A new file format

If you have used earlier versions of Sozi, you will notice that the new editor stores the presentation in a new format. For instance, if your original SVG document is my_presentation.svg, Sozi 14 will create two files:

Technically, the HTML file contains a copy of your SVG document, a copy of the presentation data, and the Sozi player software. It is a standalone document: if you want to share a presentation, you do not need to give the SVG and JSON files.

Sozi 14 can import presentations made with Sozi 13.

If you have already imported a document in Sozi 14, and if you modify it later using Sozi 13, you will need to remove the JSON file to restart the import process.

Known issues

The current version of the new editor does not display linked images. SVG documents that contain embedded images are displayed correctly.

The desktop editor is based on the official build of node-webkit. It is known to fail:

For the second issue, a quick fix consists in creating a symbolic link like this:

# Debian, Ubuntu and their derivatives, 32-bit
sudo ln -sf /lib/i386-linux-gnu/libudev.so.1 /lib/i386-linux-gnu/libudev.so.0
# Debian, Ubuntu and their derivatives, 64-bit
sudo ln -sf /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libudev.so.1 /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libudev.so.0
# Others 32-bit
sudo ln -sf /usr/lib/libudev.so.1 /usr/lib/i386-linux-gnu/libudev.so.0
# Others 64-bit
sudo ln -sf /usr/lib64/libudev.so.1 /usr/lib64/i386-linux-gnu/libudev.so.0

Sozi 14 does not support localization yet.

The following features will be added later, but they will be provided as optional extensions:

Try Sozi 14 now!

A very early preview of the new editor is available for testers. It can be run either as a standalone desktop application, or as a hosted web application.

Please note that this software is not ready for production use. Use it at your own risk.

Contribute

Report issues if you find bugs or want to suggest improvements. Please indicate clearly that you are using Sozi 14.

Help is needed to implement additional cloud storage backends in the hosted app. Google Drive is provided as a proof of concept, but we must support alternatives. The source code is available in the dev branch of the repository. See the files named sozi.editor.backend.*.js in the js folder.