Shoutbox

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.