There’s so much going on in the Mozilla community that it’s easy to miss something that would otherwise get more attention. Take Justin Dolske’s APNG Editor extension. Andrew was asking the other day on IRC if anyone had seen/used it. I had, and he and I agreed more people should know about it. To that end, he put together a page describing how to install and use it and I’m writing to tell you about it.
I’ve demoed the APNG stuff at a number of conferences and as part of various talks I’ve given. Every time I do, people are really interested and want to know how they can learn more and make their own. It turns out web developers don’t really want to use a hex editor to make animations. Go figure!
So now that you know about it and there’s no barrier anymore, let me throw out a challenge to see who can make the best APNG. Leave a link to yours in the comments.
Great work Justin. Keep it coming.
10 Comments
Is anyone working on native support for APNG in Gimp? An APNG editor as a firefox extension is fine as a stopgap measure but if the format is to really take off it needs to be supported by the tools people edit images with…
Perhaps this has been explained elsewhere, so sorry if it has, but what is the difference between APNG and MNG?
yes this is really cool! Justin++
i’ve modified the extension a bit, so i can use my SMIL XSLT to turn an animated SVG to an APNG. so as my take for the challenge here are some results:
http://www.treebuilder.de/apng/animation.png
http://www.treebuilder.de/apng/dancer.png
http://www.treebuilder.de/apng/SVGLogoAnimation2.png
the modification is just a dirty hack, so i will not publish it yet .
“Perhaps this has been explained elsewhere, so sorry if it has, but what is the difference between APNG and MNG? ”
APNG is backwards compatible with PNG. Browsers that do not support APNG will render the first frame as a normal static PNG.
I dunno about MNG’s backwards compatibility, but IIRC it’s a completely different format…
If someone knows why you cannot save an image created with this I would appreciate an email. Thanks!
You can email me at webmaster@lightstar1.com .
anyone know if a apng plugin for gimp ever came out?
> anyone know if a apng plugin for gimp ever came out?
I thought GIMP is not really an animation editor?
There’s a script option, but I don’t see where I can find scripts for it. Without being able to adjust the framerate, it’s a totally useless app to me.
Well, there are other apps out there:
http://animatedpng.com/index.php/apngedit/
[> anyone know if a apng plugin for gimp ever came out?
I thought GIMP is not really an animation editor?]
You can create animated GIF images in GIMP, so the framework for creating animated works is there. The codec to save as an animated PNG, however, is not.
It is a shame. Though I did learn something new, SVG has an animated option. There is also an SVG2APNG converter. SVG has the bit depth today’s artists need, and will convert nicely into png. Converting from GIF to PNG is ridiculous. The entire reason for using PNG over GIF to begin with is color depth, which you won’t see much, if any at all, improvement to the graphics.
With that said, there is always Flash. Ofcourse, Flash animations are quite large, have a considerable transmit time even on high speed services, and are less than easy to work with. Oh, did I mention the software to author Flash animations is quite expensive?
I don’t see it as being unreasonable to want, or even expect, one open source project to take advantage and incorporate the abilities of another open source project into it’s program.
I implore you, the reader, to contact the GIMP team and request animated PNG support to be built in.