I am the creator of a photo editor www.photopea.com, used by around 1 million people every day (of which 300,000 use Android, 150,000 use iOS). After reading this article, I am so happy that I never spent a single hour trying to publish my tool at the "mobile stores" :D
Amazing tool, use it every week! Buuuut reading the main article it just sounds like the autor didn't want to take responsibility for their games. Like it's even required by law to provide your address, email and so on in Germany if you only own a website. Continuing, it's to me very obvious to target the latest Android releases. I don't see the issue this person has.
many obvious reasons (I'm in the US and the last thing I want to provide to the world is my phone number for MORE stupid spam. My address is absolutely out of the question, not in these times. It sounds alarmist until you get physical death threats from people that may or may not have to even do with your app).
But for reference, this author is in the Neverlands and things that seem trivial for US businesses are apparently more involved over there. These small 30 euro costs aren't worth it to update some 10 year old app you'd only update if you just needed some trivial migration updates.
Can't thank you enough for photopea. Very good (and impressive) job that you've done with it! It's very useful as a frontend developer that wants to quickly edit an image!
Just a quick thank you for making and running photopea. Back when ChromeOS didn't run anything but web apps, Photopea was a godsend. I haven't used or thought about it since but I'll check it out again if the need ever arises.
That is what a "lossy compression" means. Instead of encoding the original image, you look for a similar image, that can be losslessly encoded into a smaller file.
In PNG, you look for an image with 100 - 200 colors (so that colors repeat more often) and losslessly encode it with DEFLATE.
In JPG, you look for an image with with a reduced description through DCT, and losslessly encode it with Huffmann trees.
No thats image preprocessing to lose information before compression. JPG would be smaller if color count was reduced as well.
If color quantization using a specific algorithm was part of PNG you could say its lossy compression, its not, PNG is not lossy compression by any definition. Your specific image processing pipeline might be lossy, based on various tools you ran the image through or equipment used to capture, PNG is not.
I know that the "lossines" is not included in PNG encoders, as it is in JPG / WEBP encoders. But the idea is the same: if you are ready to "accept some loss" (by reducing the number of colors in this case), you can get a much smaller PNG file.
You can get a smaller uncompressed bitmap by reducing color count too reducing bits per pixel, that does not mean bmp is a lossy compression scheme. Color quantization will reduce the final size of the image in nearly all image formats jpg/webp would benefit as well.
You could have an artist or AI render the picture as a cartoon and png will highly compress it more than the original that does not mean PNG is a lossy compression scheme.
You could take a photo with a low resolution camera and it will be smaller than a higher resolution one after PNG compression, again nothing to do with PNG.
It is no surprise simpler images with less information compress better with lossless formats than more complex ones.
Your example implies that the PNG format itself has a lossy mode, when instead its just the way the image is preprocessed which has no limit on techniques that can lose information to make the image smaller independent of the codec.
You can have a PNG and JPG versoin of the original image without no loss, and the files would be about the same size.
You can have a PNG and JPG version of the original image, with the same loss - "average error per pixel", and the files would be about the same size.
I know there is no lossy compression described in a PNG standard. But there exist programs which produce tiny PNG files with a loss. So comparing an MP4 encoder with a bult-in loss to a PNG encoder without any built-in loss is not fair. They should have made the MP4 encoder encode the video in a lossless way, just like they did with PNG.
I don't think the size is a key advantage here, even if it were true. 96 kilobytes simply isn't very big to start with, considering most of the content that gets sent around.
Like you said, support is what matters. SVG is notoriously difficult to implement and it took forever to be supported everywhere, which also contributed to the persistence of Flash. TVG is supposed to be easy to implement, which seems to be to be the advantage.
JPEG, by contrast, is a pretty simple format with only a few minor quirks.
If someone already implemented an XML parser for you, SVG is easier to implement than TVG (if you are trying to extract the same type of content out of SVG as out of TVG).
>if you are trying to extract the same type of content out of SVG as out of TVG
But then you haven't implemented SVG. You can't say "we support SVG", and you lack a good way to communicate what users can expect from your implementation. It's much easier to communicate clearly when you can implement a whole standard rather than a haphazard subset of one.
Also, parsing overhead is such a tiny fraction of the overall effort (in either case) it doesn't really mean anything.
I wrote a free PDF editor (open a PDF, edit, export a PDF), my users edit around 500,000 PDF files every month.
I have been gradually improving it for the past five years. It is a part of my photo editor https://www.Photopea.com. I know really a lot about PDF, I wish I didn't know that much :D I am glad to see that there are others who try to "make sense" of PDF files instead of just rendering them :)
** fun fact: Often, a PDF contains text as an array of characters, each has its X and Y coordinate and a style (white characters omitted). It is up to you to "cluster" them into words, lines, paragraphs ...
** Often, PDF text is made uneditable (on purpose). You see a text "Hello", but in fact, there is a text "bsiin", and a font, which renders "b" with a shape that looks like a letter "H", "s" as "e", and so on. If you open that PDF in a PDF viewer, select "Hello" and copy-paste it elsewhere, you get "bsiin".
Photopea is fantastic. I don't use Photoshop enough to justify a cloud subscription and adobe has shut down the licensing service for the version I have on disc (CS3).
I haven't accepted it. I sail harder all the time. The Adobe Creative Suite hasn't been a recent priority, but I should look it up on principal. Thank you.
Photopea also helps when you're at a random computer and can help someone do an edit that would otherwise require access to a computer with software installed.
