In case you ever need to work with GIF images, especially to optimize their filesize by reducing the colour palette, these sites might be handy to remember... (yes, I'm sure these 2 long-existing resources are "old news" for some of you, but now it's on the forum for easy reference ;) )
quick, easy optimizing (allows you to pick the "best" from a range of reduced colour palettes)
http://www.tools.dynamicdrive.com/imageoptimizer/
online image editor, includes palette reducing but also plenty of effects (!)
http://www.gifworks.com/image_editor.html
I try to not use GIF or JPG whenever possible as PNG is free of licenses and can do everything the other 2 can combined. However PNG has the color problem as well (lots of unused colors in the image) so I use a little console application called "pngout" found at http://advsys.net/ken/utils.htm you simple drag and drop an image onto the exe and it optimizes it.
QuoteI try to not use GIF or JPG whenever possible as PNG is free of licenses and can do everything the other 2 can combined.
Except compressing "real life" pictures all that well. A png ends up being several hundred KB to one or more MB, vs the couple 10s of KB for the jpeg at 80%.
I will totally agree with that Tom, for photographs nothing beats JPG
I use Jasc Animation shop to make my animated GIFs it has a lot of nice optimisation options built right in.
Quote from: Shayne on January 03, 2007, 11:53:09 AM
I try to not use GIF or JPG whenever possible as PNG is free of licenses and can do everything the other 2 can combined.
I don't like supporting license monopolies either, but thought especially for web developers the above online resources are handy to at least know about. Especially since they are free *online* tools, don't require any installation etc. Kinda like how http://www.game-oldies.com/ is nice to know about even if you have MAME installed and running. :)
Yeah, PNG rocks for license-free, lossless compressed files, but the 2nd site (GIFWorks) even lets you create animated GIFs for free as well... Not sure can PNGs be animated?
If you want the equivelent to an animated png, lookup mng, not too sure its well supported though. I'd expect full svg support (scripting, animation) will come first.
Hmm... never heard of it; guessing most browsers don't support it natively. Guess for now if you want (for example) a "progress bar" simple animation while your AJAX dynamic page is first initialized, you've gotta rely on anim.gif :-\
A while back i looked into mng, but I agree that SVG will come first. However that will only be when Microsoft decides when it should be native and uber supported.
Its amusing because mng has been arround a long while now, and fully speced out.. unlike svg, where very few libs/programs suport FULL svg.