PNG support in the Notes client? Maybe they should start with full support for GIF...
Category domino wtf
A couple of disturbing observations:
First, in a 2006 post from Julian about animated favicons, the little animated banana dances at the exact same tempo as the song "Your Star" by the All-American Rejects. Try it... it's mesmerizing.
But secondly, to explain the title of this post, I noticed an odd behavior related to image resources in the Notes client: GIF support is incomplete. ICO files are actually stored in the same format as GIF, just with a different extension. So another approach to creating animated favicons is to simply rename an animated GIF to .ICO. That's how Dean Edwards created a favicon that periodically blinks. Theoretically, then, we should be able to download any site's favicon, rename it to .GIF, import it as a file resource, and then display it in the Notes client. No such luck.
Since real browsers (read: Firefox, Safari, and Opera... of course, as always, IE fails) don't distinguish between the two formats and simply trust the server-supplied MIME type, navigate to the same image resource via a URL and the image displays as expected. But try to reference the same image resource anywhere in the Notes client (or even just preview it in the image resource list), and you get nothin' but gray.
Sorry, Bruce, I tried...
(cross-posted at BleedYellow)
A couple of disturbing observations:
First, in a 2006 post from Julian about animated favicons, the little animated banana dances at the exact same tempo as the song "Your Star" by the All-American Rejects. Try it... it's mesmerizing.
But secondly, to explain the title of this post, I noticed an odd behavior related to image resources in the Notes client: GIF support is incomplete. ICO files are actually stored in the same format as GIF, just with a different extension. So another approach to creating animated favicons is to simply rename an animated GIF to .ICO. That's how Dean Edwards created a favicon that periodically blinks. Theoretically, then, we should be able to download any site's favicon, rename it to .GIF, import it as a file resource, and then display it in the Notes client. No such luck.
Since real browsers (read: Firefox, Safari, and Opera... of course, as always, IE fails) don't distinguish between the two formats and simply trust the server-supplied MIME type, navigate to the same image resource via a URL and the image displays as expected. But try to reference the same image resource anywhere in the Notes client (or even just preview it in the image resource list), and you get nothin' but gray.
Sorry, Bruce, I tried...
(cross-posted at BleedYellow)
Comments
Posted by Carl Tyler At 09:45:57 AM On 06/27/2008 | - Website - |
Posted by Charles Robinson At 10:21:03 AM On 06/27/2008 | - Website - |
Posted by Mike VandeVelde At 07:54:09 PM On 06/27/2008 | - Website - |
@Mike - PNG is important because it combines the "best of both worlds" between GIF and JPEG: the higher quality of JPEG with the transparency of GIF. One of the easiest ways to add a bit of extra polish to a Notes client UI is to use custom graphics; for example, professional-grade icons on action buttons, background graphics for tables to display rounded corners, etc. But in almost every case you'll want transparency, so you have to use a GIF. But GIF is lower quality than PNG, so if you start with a PNG and convert it to GIF, you lose some color quality and, in almost every case, there's a bit of pixelation as well. And yes, SVG support would be fantastic...
Posted by Tim Tripcony At 01:09:17 AM On 06/28/2008 | - Website - |
IE looks at the binary data, and so does Notes. It doesn't matter what the extension or any metadata says the file is, they crack open the file, check its headers, and determine what it is before they load it. If the headers aren't of the type that the app expects the file doesn't load. It's truly a more secure way of loading binary files.
There are obviously some limits to what browsers will accept (you can't rename a ZIP to favicon.ico), so they are doing some checks similar to IE and Notes. They're just more lax about what they will render.
On the subject of GIF vs PNG. I often end up with banding on GIF's when they're rendered in the Notes client. You have to be extremely careful about color depth and how you do gradients or they look like utter crap. And PNG's alpha-channel transparency lets you create blended transparency without the halo effect you get from GIF, which is causing me LOTS of problems in an app I'm working on now.
Posted by Charles Robinson At 10:52:55 AM On 06/28/2008 | - Website - |