Economy and Image Formats . . .

Richmond Mathewson geradamas at yahoo.com
Sat Nov 1 10:19:55 EDT 2008


Colin Holgate wrote:

"Depending on the nature of the image, JPEG may well be a better option  
than either PNG or GIF."

Well, I should perhaps have qualified things insofar as where I do not
require transparency I use JPEG.

However, I have built up a library of reuseable images for nav-btns, 
answer checkers, and so on, that, to be reused against differing 
backgrounds, and (as is often the case with my internal work) overlap 
fields, have to be stored in a format that offers transparency.

As most of the imagery I employ are either 'textured' background images or
cartoon-style characters (animals and children, the usual artefacts 
employed in teaching EFL to children: tables and chairs, crayons, pens and 
pencils) the fact that they will only have a range of 256 colours does not 
seem to matter much. On the few occasions I use a photograph [recently 
some kids have been extrapolating the Present Continuous Tense from a film 
of a Komodo Dragon eating a live chicken] I generally go for JPEG.

My main concern is to be as 'mean' as possible when building stacks as 
my target machines are P3s (500-800 MHz 128 RAM) running Ubuntu 5.04; 
and they need to be relatively responsive as fairly tired of undoing the 
damage wreaked by "obsessive multiple clickers".

What is interesting to me, as well, is that the Runtime Revolution 
Use-List has, at least to my mind, been slightly top-heavy on programming
 concerns, and lacking in the area of the day-to-day practicalities as 
mentioned above. May be I'm the only person who is trying to programs for 
machines that don't have socking great processors and surplus RAM; but I 
just don't believe it.

For GOOD programming for Language Content Delivery and Reinforcement for 
children (at least) good, strong, attractive graphics are at a premium; 
and there will always be a tussle between the desire to produce programs 
that satisfy this requirement and the limitations of the machines on which 
these programs are going to be delivered to the end-user.

To me, at least, this is of paramount importance as that is what pays for
my bread and cheese.

sincerely, Richmond Mathewson.

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A Thorn in the flesh is better than a failed Systems Development Life Cycle.
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