New Animated PNG Creation Tools Intend To Bring APNG Into Mainstream Use

Kagetsuki writes "While grainy GIF images can have entertaining uses, they aren't the ideal animated image format due to lack of full color support and an alpha channel [for varied transparency]. Animated PNG doesn't have these faults and has been available and incorporated in quite a few browsers since roughly 2004. Lack of tools and recognition has hurt adoption, so to remedy this there is a campaign on Kickstarter to create an Open Source, high quality Animated PNG [APNG] conversion library and GUI Editor based on the APNG Assembler tool 'apngasm.' Even the primary goal includes libraries/modules for C/C++ and Ruby along with a cross platform GUI authoring tool. Aside from supporting the project simply using APNG willl help raise interest and support in the standard and bring us one step closer to a world with cleaner animated images."

quite a few browsers?

[infernalC]

Animated PNG support is terrible... see:

http://caniuse.com/apng [caniuse.com]

No IE, no Chrome, Opera dropped it when they went to Webkit, no iPhone, no Android...
looks like it's pretty much only available on 20%ish of desktop browsers and pretty much nothing mobile. You aren't going to get anyone to use it in a public-facing web application yet. Remember the days of "this site looks best in (Internet Explorer/Netscape/whatever)"... let's not do that again.

Maybe if the HTML 5 standard said that conforming user agents have to do this it would put a little more umph behind it. Of course, the standard seems to follow browser development in many cases now, not the other way around.

The problem is size limits

[macemoneta]

Most sites that use animated GIFs have restrictions on size and dimensions (typically 500x500 1MB). The quality of APNG within those restrictions won't be any better.

Re:quite a few browsers?

[Anonymous Coward]

This, this, a million times this. Basically the only widely-used browser that supports APNG is Firefox. Until IE and Webkit follow suit, APNG is a total non-starter.

Kickstarter: frenemy of free software

[Anonymous Coward]

I remember when people wrote free software because it scratched an itch. Kickstarter seems to be setting a trend where people won't write free software unless they get paid. (Or they will write it and refuse to release it unless they get paid). That's not FREE software, it's hostage software.

Re:quite a few browsers?

[Rhywden]

I don't see another lossless image format with alpha channel support and 8/24bit colour depth around, do you?

Remember when

[suso]

Remember when creating high quality open source software didn't require a Kickstarter campaign?

Kickstarter: friend of free software

[tuppe666]

I remember when people wrote free software because it scratched an itch.

There are talented individuals producing small free software, or joining organisation to produce larger software, and companies with real money able to contribute/create to free software. Is there no room in that for funding a group *itch*(sic), or helping an (group of) individuals scratch theirs who otherwise wouldn't be able to due to life commitments...software takes time and effort to create.

The bottom line is people produce free software for a whole host of reasons. I personally see money being a great reason, as do all those companies already contributing to free software. In reality its the most common one.

Re:quite a few browsers?

[mwvdlee]

My first thought exactly.
We don't need APNG creator tools, we need browser support first.

Re:quite a few browsers?

[ArsonSmith]

We don't need chickens we need eggs!!

Re:quite a few browsers?

[The Cat]

Ah yes, HTML5. The greatest vaporware in history.

Re:quite a few browsers?

[jimbo]

Even a few percent would save Google terabytes a day. That's why improvements to compression and protocols that seem quite insignificant to the end user are very popular at the host.

Re:quite a few browsers?

[halltk1983]

Insignificant until you have 30,000 people a month pull it from your server. Then it's 60 MB saved, per pic at a tiny picture size. If you look at the top two, they're 52 and 57 KB. At the number of hits on that, it's 1.5 GB per picture, which starts to add up, even at that tiny number of hits. For a site that gets that per day? 450GB / month, which isn't a tiny number in bandwidth charges. That's $600 per year in bandwidth at many hosts, per picture (I know at that usage pattern they get special rates). That's just on the server side.

On the client side, what if they're on cell modems, in rural areas, sometimes on the 2G networks getting 110 kbps (that's bits, chief). Or satellite internet. Or anything that measures bandwidth used. I know my parents saved 5-25% bandwidth on all the images that were downloaded, it would make their satellite internet a hell of a lot more usable. Even on 3g, or in congested areas, it could make a difference.