Shoutbox

I will have a look into this now stuart to see if there is a way of me making the images smaller as last time it was done they were over stretched so there must be a way of doing it in fireworks and as for photoshop i don't have it so that one is kind of out the window

Edit: PNG8 makes them stretched but PNG24 makes them look ok well for 1 of the skins I will make them all PNG24's rather than PNG36 tomorrow when I have more time unless there is another way to compress them in fireworks (I went to export preview then changed from PNG32 to PNG 24)

ok Jason i put all the background down to png 24 in all of our themes, in the themes ive tested theres no overstretching effect and it therefore seems to be ok, however we arent saving that much its gone from 11.8MB to 8.34MB, while that is impressive we have to consider that we still have more themes to add so when completed its still going to be more than 15MB when we are done.

however what i havent done is go and convert every image down from png32 to png24 i only did the background, the text images and status icons, theme icons, gradient images and min max close buttons may only be like 30kb each but when you have enough of theme it soon mounts up. it would be interesting to see how much we save by taking them all down to png 24.

EDIT:

jason i did want to clear something up about virgin media, you can attach any size files to your email on any isp, the problem is that file attachments in and of themselves contribute to the overall size of your message, so for example you can send or receive 10 emails of size 1MB each or 1 email thats 10MB, so if you had a completely empty mailbox at this moment in time i could theorectically send you our skin (8.34MB) but then you could only receive a furth 1.66MB of other email after that anyone else trying to send you email will get a delivery status failure message stating that message delivery failed because your mailbox is full and until you then retreived your mail thus clearing it off the mail server nobody would be able to send you any email.

each ISP sets there own limits as to what size mailboxes there customers get, some ISP's may even have a multi-tier system where if you pay so much for the silver service you get 10MB mailbox if you pay for the gold you get 15MB NOTE: those numbers are theorectical to my knowledge they dont actually represent an ISP that im aware of they are just an example.

i just thought it was worth clearing up any confusion regarding sending and receiving attachments via email.

EDIT:

i have encountered a problem, when i changed imaged images like the dashboard header etc to png24 ive discovered that it actually causes the whole window to go invisible, in default theme the result was that the ads from microsoft were visible but everything else was entirely painted over in like brilliant white emulsion you could click on things and they were there to use but as everything was white you couldnt really see what you were doing, does anybody know why this has happened?

i tested a possibility and heres what i have discovered, the following images can never ever ever be saved as png 24.

buddy images
min, max & close buttons
any custom buttons
corner images

the only thing i know is common to all of these images is they have metadata tags defined on them in skininfo and it would appear that metadata cant be applied to png24 type images.

EDIT:

its not the metadata that causes the problem its images with transparent elements like a few of the word wheel images etc, so ive done all the images with no transparent elements in them and i got the filesize down to 5.71MB, still a bit big and im concerned that once we add the remaining themes itll be back up to 10MB even with keeping up this image optimisation.

Nice long post stuart yeah aslong as it don't go over 10mb I think we should be ok and I use windows mail to get my emails anyway and have never had problems getting my emails as I think that once I have them then there not on the server but not sure on that one I didn't leanr much about emails as college only ththe basics of email really

once you retreive them your mailbox on the server gets emptied but between mail retreivals if it goes over 10MB then people will find they cant send you mail.

Back to getting the .plsk smaller . Stuart: I just replied to your mail.

Basically, i got the .plsk size down from 11.8MB to 2.73MB by removing duplicate files and optimizing images.

To check for duplicate files: DoubleKiller
To optimize images: XnView. If you don't like installing you can get the ZIP version. Once in XnView go to Tools > Batch Processing.

More details are in Stuart's mail, but this should get people with the same problem pointed in the right direction.

thanks menthix, i did the xnview thing and got my already optimised pack of size 5.73mb down to 2.91mb, i have used the doublekiller the reason being most themes use seperate copies of the uifiles for a reason and just using one copy of each uiifile stored in a central directory would cause huge display problems.

quote:

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Originally posted by stuartbennett
thanks menthix, i did the xnview thing and got my already optimised pack of size 5.73mb down to 2.91mb, i have used the doublekiller the reason being most themes use seperate copies of the uifiles for a reason and just using one copy of each uiifile stored in a central directory would cause huge display problems.

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Yeah some of the themes use different text colours so having one set of uifiles wouldn't work