Shoutbox

quote:

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Originally posted by ShawnZ
upload your skin somewhere and link it here, i'm sure somebody will take a look at optimizing it.

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Yeah I will speak to stuart as we both work on the skin we have to agree

i dont have too much of an objection to breaking it down into seperate skins, it would atleast give me a fix to my word wheel problem, however when we started talking about making seperate skins a few weeks back it was suggested that we made one big one that had everything.

alot of the weight of this skin is comprised of the backgrounds, just the backgrounds alone comees to 5.96MB, we have taken out all unneeded files a few weeks ago which did cut it down by about 1MB but im not really sure what else can be done to be honest.

once ive added in status icons ill send it to you menthix although im not sure how right now. the reason why it cant go by email is as follows, you get your email from a pop server for example pop.ntlworld.com, those servers allow each user a maximum size for there mailbox, in the case of hotmail thats 10GB but in the case of ntl now known as virgin media its 10MB.

i know for a fact that whoever jason uses as an ISP dont allow him to receive emails this large and i assume that messenger plus tries to use a relatively cheap domain so you allow so many megs for skins, scripts sound packs the plus installer etc but wont get much megs for email i would presume.

quote:

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Originally posted by stuartbennett
i assume that messenger plus tries to use a relatively cheap domain so you allow so many megs for skins, scripts sound packs the plus installer etc but wont get much megs for email i would presume

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Messenger Plus' sites and email are hosted on various dedicated systems. In other words: Patchou configures his own emailserver, AFAIK we can receive unlimited (only limited by server's harddisk space) attachments... if that isn't the case we can configure it that way .

But if your mailprovider doesn't allow big attachments, get free hosting somewhere (MeEtc can help you), upload it there and only send the URL in your mail.

ok menthix thanks for that, i will get status icons added to the defaul theme and get min max close buttons replicated to the other windows and will then send to you to see if theres anything you can do for us regarding the filesize, thanks again menthix i really appreciate this.

I am also on virgin media (was ntl) so my attachment limit is 10mb I hope we can shorten down our skin pack but if not I suppose splitting in in half will be the only other option

Me and stuart will discuss this after menthix has helped us to try and shorten it down

ok menthix ive emailed that to you on the skins submission email address with the subject line "image optimisation" i havent had any delivery status failure messages come back yet, hopefully thats a good sign.

we hope that youll be able to help us and we really do appreciate any help you can give us with this.

Stuart just sent me a PM saying he's using Fireworks to edit the image. I'll say the same thing here as in my reply. Fireworks by default will save its PNG images in a layered format to continue allow editing This will usually make an image filesize 2-3x larger than what it should be. Saving the file as type 'Flattened PNG' instead of 'Fireworks PNG' will fix this.

ok meetc ill give that a go however do you know if that will cause the overstretching effect i mentioned earlier?

EDIT:

i tried this there is no flattened png option when doing a save as in fireworks mx, i did originally start out with fireworks cs3 which might of had such an option but i dont have any serial numbers for that but do have serial numbers for fireworks mx, the best i could do was to do a ctrl+a and go modify > flattern selection doing that and resaving only shaves 2kb of the filesize however.

i tried doing as a png 8 a few weeks ago instead of the current png32 but that resulted in overstretched images which is a compromise that neither me nor jason are willing to make.

I'm not sure, but it shouldn't. Just make sure to make a copy of all your raw images before you save them as flattened. otherwise, there's no way to get the layer information back

if you have photoshop there's a function in there to save pictures for the web (Ctrl+ Alt + Shift + A)

that's what i did on mine, initially they're layered pngs in fireworks, but i reduced the skin to under half size (11mb-5mb) by using this method of optimising them