New Animated PNG Creation Tools Intend To Bring APNG Into Mainstream Use 246
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."
MNG? (Score:2, Interesting)
What happened to the MNG version of PNG?
what happened to MNG? (Score:5, Interesting)
From this 2004 story: http://tech.slashdot.org/story/04/08/28/2312256/presenting-apng-like-mng-only-better [slashdot.org]
"Unlike MNG, APNG is not a separate file format, but rather an extension to PNG. Thus, APNG images are just normal PNG images (with the .png extension) but can be animated. The system is fully backwards-compatable, so any program that can open a PNG image will be able to open an APNG image (though non-APNG viewers will only show the first frame). Vitally, the decoder just adds an extra few kilobytes onto a standard PNG decoder. APNG support is in the process of being checked into Mozilla. Hopefully, other programs will follow suit."
GIF /does/ support true colors (Score:4, Interesting)
It's worth noting that GIFs may overlay multiple image blocks with separate color pallets, resulting in true color images [tweakers.net].
The problem here is that some browsers (chrome) insert an artificial 0.1s delay between "frames".
Also if you can do this [amusingplanet.com] with GIF one has to wonder if APNG has actually any viability other than as a source format.