This has been a good week for progress on the book. Chapter 4 - Layout is basically in the can (although not submitted yet for various reasons), and I'm making big progress on "The Big One". Chapter 5 is slated to be "Visuals", which means one chapter to cover 2D, 3D, Text, Animation, and Media. I budgeted almost 100 pages for this one chapter, and it's hard to get through.

Its a good reminder that our platform is really big. Not only is it really big, but it also builds on itself. No sooner have I spent 20 pages pages talking about 2D drawing, then I hit 3D where you can take anything from 2D and project it onto 3D. Of course, everything in the whole system can be animated, etc.

All the drawings in the book are being authored in Avalon. I decided that there isn't a platform out there that can capture Avalon bettern than Avalon. I've ended up having to write some new controls (a "SmartShape" library that clones some PowerPoint/Visio features for diagraming), but overall it hasn't been too much work. The workflow is a bit painful - I end up writing the XAML in AvPad, then doing a screenshot. I really need to write a XAML -> TIF program, so that I can skip the screenshot step.

My new favorite feature in the platform - scRGB. I love the extra color and everything, but I really dig the text format in markup. For some reason I find it really easy to write: "sc# .8,1,0,0" for 80% opaque red, instead of "#CCFF0000". I know I should be geeky enough to think natively in hex, but the decimal representation to be really easy to grok.

I also stumbled across an ole post from Joe Beda about scRGB, which I liked so much I asked for permission to include chunks of his post in the book (I'm not sure how much it takes for "plagerism", but since I want to take the *idea* of comparing scRGB to Unicode, I figure it was polite to ask). Joe already said "yes" - thanks Joe!

I've got about 40 more pages to go on the Visuals chapter, if I can push through it this week, then I think I'm golden on schedule.