Lorraine Design NEWS

[Ross_Geller]

@Rodney

Unfortunately the PNG standard only supports a single image.  The MNG  standard supports multiple images (just like gifanim but without the drawbacks), but alas it seems to have almost fallen off the face of the earth, even Mozilla's internal support has been dropped :-(  (although you can still download an extension for it)

I'm not sure if MorphOS's support for PNG images as icons somehow supports a second image, but I can only think of two ways that might be usable as support for second images:

1. MNG support.   While not supported by many, there is complete documentation available here, and also a library libmng, so a little program that could merge multiple PNGs into an MNG wouldn't be an uphill struggle to write.  
However, these images would then become incompatible with the wide selection of PNG images available (unless a MNG to PNG convertor was written).  This would probably make them a format only for amiga since, to my best knowledge, no other platform has (native or 3rd party) support for MNGs as icons.  Also, I wouldn't like to think of how much extra work supporting MNGs would be for our dear programmer, Elena Novaretti... and any certain great PNG icon designers :-D

2. Add a range of filters that can be applied to PNG images when you click on them.  Basically a fancier version of what we already have.  Again more work for the programmer, whether they choose to hard encode said filters or implement a plugin system.

Either way, you're hindered by format support of icons outside of the amiga community.

That's just my 30 cents... ;-)

[Ross_Geller]

Lovely icons, you've done a terrific job with them :-)

I really like the Snork up the top too! :-D

[Ross_Geller]

After a lot more reading on the subject of MNGs, I think I've found some reasons for why it has been dropped.  
W3C don't have it as a standard because currently it doesn't fit into their framework.  Neither does PNG officially, but they made it a standard before all their policies, tests and frameworks were properly laid out, making it very hard to go back.
As for IE, from my understanding that doesn't even have full PNG support, so MNG support would seem to be somewhere over the rainbow.
And as for Mozilla's support (changing from internal support to an extension), I've just been reading through the bug report for removal of MNG support, which explained that the maintainer was having to stop work on it, but that a new maintainer came along and turned it into an extension.  The bug report shows how fiercely people fought to keep at least some support for MNGs in Mozilla, even it is now purely as a little used extension.
Finally, information from Wikipedia (simply because it gives the clearest history of MNG), points out that MNG is a much younger format than PNG, the MNG spec being published in early 2001, whereas PNG had been in development had been in development since 1995 (straight after Unisys and Compuserve decided to make the most of their patent) and it's spec had been knocked up to version 1.1 at the very end of 1998.
So perhaps all MNG really needs is a bit of time (and some actual support for what looks like a great format). (and for those using Opera, this MNG plugin might be of interest.)

I like your idea of a database of icons on the user's computer, sort of the same way as Windows does it with Shell32.dll (except that I would like to see all icon images stored in the database, rather than some being attached only to the programs - too messy for my liking), or a wider reaching version of DefIcons.  You've definitely started a few thoughts knocking around my head Rodney :-D