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

Posted by timothy on from the so-many-to-choose-from dept.

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."

2 of 246 comments (clear)

  1. quite a few browsers? by infernalC · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Animated PNG support is terrible... see:

    http://caniuse.com/apng

    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.

    1. Re:quite a few browsers? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

      BMP, TIF, TGA, EXR, WEBP, various 'raw' formats.

      Each of which are either stupidly larger than PNG, require decoders with much larger memory footprints to account for all the features of the format that are entirely useless in a web browser (this is supposed to be a format for the web, not a goddamned CMYK printing press), or are blindly hated due to being supported by one or more Evil-Companies-Of-The-Month(tm). Nice try, though.