Is there any info on a site about this subject? Or indiestep latest stable build accepts .pngs directly instead of .bmps?
No documentation I'd seen so I had to ask.
i'm wondering if alpha-transparency could be coded into the core of ls?
No. The core could make it slightly easier to implement alpha transparency, but you would still have to modify all modules individually to add support for it.
And this alpha transparency is for only win 2k + over, huh? Just much hard disk free for me then, heh..
of course you can use magic pink in PNGs :)
Wont PNGs load slower compared to compressed (8 bit or less) BMPs? I've seen some themes that uses PNG when in my opinion theres no need for it, e.g they don't have any transparency. Or is there an option to compress PNGs just as much as BMPs? Sorry for asking but I prefer minimal themes where there is no need for fancy shadows, so I haven't worked with PNGs up to now.
PNGs are compressed, and you can have 8-bit pngs. In theory, small files will load faster, but I dunno how much the difference has to be to offset the decompression time.
For ultra-small images:
- reduce the color depth as much as possible
- include the smallest possible palette
- convert to png
- use pngcrush with -brute -l 9
Using this on an old copy of Xhenit (automated, so the palettes could probably be smaller), the bmps fit into a 28.1k zip file, the pngs 29.1k. Uncompressed, the bmps take 764k, the png 52.9k.
I think I'll but together a theme with both BMPs and PNGs and measure the differens. My first impression of slow themes are that they often use PNGs, but slownes can have many causes so I better not make any judgements until I try this out.
I think a lot of "Include ..." lines in the step.rc can slow down the startup/recycle time
If you use layercut.dll in a theme to enable alpha blending with pngs, it will load a bit slower than shortcut2, I haven't tried useing a png with shortcut2 yet so I don't know if they'll slow down a loading time.
Milk: "I prefer minimal themes where there is no need for fancy shadows, so I haven't worked with PNGs up to now."
You might really like what you can do with alpha blending, it's alot more than just shadows. For example, a simple anti-aliased edge on a graphic can turn out a lot cleaner (imho) and you just can't do that with magic pink, you either end up with jaggies, magic pink corruption, or both. :/
I use PNG instead of BMP since support was include in the core. I think that on today's machine PNG decompression time shouldn't be noticeable...
Mear|in, I agree with you. Minimalistic wasn't a good word here. I just like straight lines in my interfaces giving them a clear border to the more dynamic content, e.g the windows. Of course AA is good in the graphics themselvs. Anyway, I think this speed subject could prove to be an interesting thread on itself.