This article titled “Apps rush: Say What?!, City Trading, Boxee for iPad and more” was written by Stuart Dredge, for guardian.co.uk on Wednesday 10th August 2011 12.39 Asia/Calcutta

A burst of 6 apps for your consideration

Say What?!

We wrote about London startup 8linQ earlier in 2011: a joint venture including former developers of DJ Hero, it’s focusing on mobile and tablet music games. Say What?! is its first effort: a game based around tapping icons to match the lyrics of songs from Kasabian, the Zutons, Scouting for Girls and – yes! – The Nolans.
iPhone

City Trading

City Trading is a BlackBerry OS 6 app from financial trading firm City Index. It claims to be the first live spread betting and CFD trading app for BlackBerry, letting people trade around the clock.
BlackBerry

Kinsky

Hi-fi firm Linn has released this iPhone and iPad app for people who want to remotely control their Linn DS system at home.
iPhone / iPad

Boxee for iPad

Boxee is best known for its set-top box, but now the company has a spin-off iPad app. It lets users stream video from their computer to their iPad over Wi-Fi, while also pulling down web videos shared by friends on Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr. Video can also be sent wirelessly to the Boxee box itself, for bigger screen viewing.
iPad

Bon Appetit: Pasta Perfect

The latest iPad cookbook app to hit the App Store comes from Bon Appetit, offering 100 old and new pasta-based recipes. It’s the work of Conde Nast Digital.
iPad

Sketch Pad

Sketch Pad is an innovative app for HTC’s Android tablets. Well, the ones that support its Scribble technology anyway. The idea: draw, write musical notation or scribble notes using the stylus from the HTC Flyer.
Android

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This article titled “The best games of 2010″ was written by Felix Atkin, Serge Pennings, Chris Schilling, Giles Richards, Will Freeman, Kelly MacDonald, Toby Moses, for The Observer on Sunday 12th December 2010 05.36 Asia/Calcutta

Medal of Honor

(Xbox 360, PS3, PC, Electronic Arts)

Call of Duty: Black Ops had the hype, yet left many cold with its frustratingly linear campaign mode. That gave Medal of Honor, admittedly also a flawed but heart-thumping depiction of the conflict in Afghanistan, the edge for me. Multiplayer mode was limited to team battles only, but it looked superb and was fast-paced and exciting – the strategic winner. Felix Atkin

Fifa 11

(Xbox 360, PS3, Wii, PC, Electronic Arts)

Fifa simply demanded attention, despite offering no great innovations and with controls that have barely changed in over more than a decade. Yet the feel had evolved radically. Perhaps it was the new physicality when competing for the ball or online multiplayer. FA

Mass Effect 2

(Xbox 360, PC, Electronic Arts)

Released way back in January, ME2 has stayed on my radar (and in my Xbox) all year long. PS3 owners will only get their hands on it in early 2012. It looks phenomenal, and there simply isn’t a better tactical sci-fi shooter with strong RPG elements out there. Serge Pennings

Kinect

(Xbox 360, Microsoft)

Pushing gaming technology to redefine the nature of playing was Kinect’s controller-free motion sensor system’s ambitious aim and only time will tell how well this innovative hardware works. But right here, right now, it’s simply unalloyed fun. There was delight for kids and attitude-free grown-ups alike in the flailing abandon of top launch titles Dance Central, Kinectimals and Sports. Terrific stuff. Giles Richards

Super Mario Galaxy 2

(Wii, Nintendo)

Fears that one of gaming’s stars was running out of steam were banished in a glorious cascade of ideas. Concepts that elsewhere might fuel an entire game were thrown in to a single level before moving swiftly on. Far from struggling, Galaxy was a game apart, so far removed and far ahead of other platformers that it might have, aptly, come from another galaxy. Kelly MacDonald

Demon’s Souls

(PS3, Namco)

Cruel, bloody, uncompromising – Demon’s Souls was as far from the primary-coloured Super Mario Galaxy 2 as possible, but just as full of ideas. Fusing third-person action, survival horror and astonishingly forward-thinking online integration into something unforgettable, this is one of the bravest, most darkly compelling games ever, let alone this year. And if you had the perseverance to crack its armour plating, it was also one of the most rewarding. KM

Red Dead Redemption

(Xbox 360, PS3, Rockstar)

When not busy saving the universe, it was time to kick back and whittle some, with the magnificent Red Dead Redemption. No mere Grand Theft Auto on horseback, its playable mix of story, challenges and gunplay made me forget never actually wanting to be a cowboy when growing up. SP

Vanquish

(Xbox 360, PS3, Sega)

One can only assume that Vanquish’s lacklustre sales were a result of it being just too intense – it’s a magnificent shooter conducted at a furious pace. It’s a game you need to play stylishly to really enjoy. Using all the acrobatic moves at your disposal make it a beautiful bullet ballet. Chris Schilling

Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood

(Xbox 360, PS3, Ubisoft)

This was an equally pleasant surprise: a polished and hugely enjoyable game that had much more variety than the previous titles. One particularly atmospheric sequence involved exploring the ruins of an old church, pulling off some heart-in-the-mouth leaps between the rafters – easily one of the in-game moments of 2010. CS

Angry Birds

(iPhone, iPad, most other touchscreen phones)

For the past 12 months, it’s been hard to avoid Angry Birds. Although released at the end of last year on iPhone, since becoming available on other handsets in 2010, sales have leapt to more than 36 million worldwide. Its simple premise, catapulting a variety of disgruntled avians at evil green porcine egg thieves, has gripped the world. Halloween- and Christmas-themed releases this year, and versions for the Xbox 360, PS3 and Wii scheduled for 2011, suggest the enthusiasm shows no sign of wavering. Toby Moses

Star Wars: Falcon Gunner

(iPhone, THQ)

A simple premise, that’s performed handsomely enough, but Falcon Gunner really earns a spot with one fantastic feature. Placing the player in the gunner seat of the Millennium Falcon, its “augmented reality” option allows Tie Fighters to swarm around whatever your iPhone camera’s viewfinder points at. Sitting in a swivel chair and rotating 360 degrees to shoot down passing foes is incredibly immersive, and offers a fascinating glimpse at the possibilities this technology will offer. TM

Bayonetta

(Xbox 360, PS3, Sega)

This strangely camp release starring a provocative heroine in a contemporary fantasy setting was simultaneously ludicrous and enthralling – a dazzling blend of pantomime and opera. With ambitious level design and depth of gameplay as additional highlights, Bayonetta’s disregard for gaming’s norms was a triumph. Will Freeman

Heavy Rain

(PS3, Sony)

Thriller Heavy Rain was remarkably cinematic, and pushed the genre closer towards the concept of the “interactive movie”. Both powerful and terrifying, it represented a significant moment in the history of the medium – one where player decisions dramatically affected the unfolding adventure. WF

F1 2010

(Xbox 360, PS3, PC, Codemasters)

It was buggy, flawed and clearly launched too soon – and yet months later, F1 2010 is still unputdownable. Take all the assists off and grapple with driving one of these tortuous, exacting, uncontrollable monster. Then try it for full-race distance. GR

What have we missed? Have your say below

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This article titled “Virtual worlds: is this where real life is heading?” was written by Victor Keegan, for The Observer on Sunday 22nd August 2010 04.33 Asia/Calcutta

Recently a man bought a space station for 0,000, while last month Small Planet Foods, a subsidiary of General Foods, introduced a new brand of organic blueberries. What have these two products got in common? Neither actually exist. Well, not except as pixels in the virtual worlds where they are traded. Only the money is real.

The space station was sold in the virtual world Entropia Universe, which has its own economy and currency. The buyer, who converted his 0,000 into 3.3m PED (Project Entropia dollars), is convinced that virtual shops on his virtual space station will produce virtual profits that can be converted back into real dollars. The blueberries represent a “brand extension” of a product that exists in the real world as US company General Foods aims to establish a presence in FarmVille, a game which exists as an application on Facebook and which at its peak has had nearly 80 million players. It is a classic example of a new genre.

Farmers in FarmVille buy cartoon-like virtual farm animals, which have to be regularly fed, or crops that require fertiliser (virtual, of course) to help them grow, in order to be more successful than their friends. The real-time game has its own virtual currency that makes it easier for members to trade and for the game’s makers to profit. Parent company Zynga has revenues of more than 0m a year which come mainly from FarmVille, despite competition from half a dozen other farm games on Facebook. Zynga is reckoned to be worth between bn and bn, based on the value of investment stakes that have been taken in it.

To many, this seems crazy: why spend real money to buy a virtual currency to purchase food in order to stop a pig that doesn’t exist from dying through lack of food? The easy answer is why not – if that’s what you want to do. It is arguably a lot more “real” – whatever that means these days – than, say, sitting like a couch potato watching a soap on television.

This might still seem the stuff of fantasy but it’s where real life seems to be heading: according to some analysts, we are in the midst of a virtual revolution that might one day be considered as important as the industrial revolution. Nic Mitham, founder of KZero, a Cambridge-based consultancy, says that there are 175 virtual worlds that are live or in live beta and that the number of registered users to them has risen from 880 million in the fourth quarter of 2009 to 1.1 billion today, a 25% increase within six months in the middle of a recession. The registered population of virtual worlds (even if this is not the same as active users) is greater than the populations of the US and Europe combined.

Children are already, and perhaps inevitably, very familiar with all this. Habbo Hotel, a virtual world where teenagers trade goods and clothes, has increased the number of its registered residents to 175 million from 160 million a year ago and the London-based Moshi Monsters, a sub-teen world where kids meet and trade virtual goods with each other now has 20 million members compared with 12 million at the end of last year.

Meanwhile, going in the opposite direction to General Foods, Moshi Monsters recently announced that the branded goods it has developed within its virtual world are to be sold in the real world, an example of something else we will have to get used to: a convergence of real and virtual products.

Little wonder that Will Walsh, CEO of Sharpcards, which creates virtual cards for people to send to each other from their mobiles, believes “there will be a time in the future when kids spend more money in certain areas on virtual goods than they do in the real world.”

Second Life, where you can choose your own avatar, build your own house and buy and sell clothing, is still the best-known virtual world in this country. Launched in 2003, it claims up to 20 million registered users, although only about 1.4 million have been active in the past 60 days. For some it’s been a rocky road: its San Diego-born creator Philip Rosedale stepped down as CEO in 2008, but is now back in charge following recent redundancies at developers Linden Lab.

The latest published figures claim that virtual transactions (sales of land, clothes and artefacts) in Second Life came to 0m last year and that the volume of user-to-user transactions (selling each other clothes, furniture and land) rose between April and May this year from .9m to .6m. However, it would be surprising if this growth were maintained in view of Second Life’s managerial problems and a sharp decline in the value of land within the virtual world. Casual visitors are arriving in fewer numbers and long-term residents seem increasingly to keep themselves to themselves – focusing on niche educational projects, virtual business meetings, sex or art.

I joined Second Life five years ago and, with the help of a neighbour there, set up an art gallery. To begin with, I displayed other people’s artworks before – after I realised that the game’s tools enable anyone to transform creative ideas into (virtual) paintings or sculptures without formal training – showing off works of my own.

My neighbour Juanita Deharo (her SL identity – in real life she is Judy Barrass and lives in Australia) now produces artworks that bridge the real and virtual worlds. But citing falling sales of her work because of problems there, she has thought about leaving Second Life. “There are signs the community is on the move into other virtual worlds,” she says.

Other virtual worlds? Competing with Second Life now are several similar online communities, including OpenLife, Blue Mars and Inworldz. The former bills itself an an open-source alternative grid for Second Life, set up in Australia in 2007, “to create a user content created virtual world orientated towards users, affordable ownership and community”.

Blue Mars is more restrictive than Second Life in terms of allowing its users to make their own content, but this 3D virtual world platform (developed in Hawaii by a company called Avatar Reality) has let more than 200 developers – mostly individuals or indie game designers – loose on creating cities, games and 3D environments on a terraformed version of Mars. Opened to the public in September 2009, and still in beta testing, it promises users better graphics and a more streamlined experience as a result. Blue Mars further differs from Second Life in that avatars cannot be fully customised and the emphasis is on shopping and gaming rather than social interaction.

Nonetheless, successful (virtual) fashion designer Estelle Parnall is taking her business away from Second Life into Blue Mars. “Everything will be better, once the content gets created,” she says. “The graphics, and in particular avatar appearance and clothing, are of a much higher standard than could be reproduced in SL and in virtual platforms relying on social engagement, this is of paramount importance.”

For Juanita Deharo, “what keeps me in Second Life is the international community of artists, audience and curators, and these new grids can’t match the diversity, stability, performance and security of SL at this stage.” She acknowledges none the less that “the scene is changing rapidly”.

The growth in virtual worlds for children is also continuing. Last month, for instance, saw the launch of Innerstar University, created by a US toy company, in which pre-teens can create doll avatars to navigate the campus of a virtual university, earning stars by competing cheerleading or horseriding games that can then be redeemed for pets or a haircut.

Closed virtual worlds dedicated to business or education are also flourishing. Based in Florida and Boston, ReactionGrid was founded by three Second Life programmers in January 2009. They build bespoke virtual worlds for business clients (including Microsoft and a number of universities) – usually as a “fun” way of facilitating business tutorials, such as an interactive arcade version of a PowerPoint-like presentation. Worlds created include classrooms, campuses, and bar lounges.

Side by side with the trend to build escapist worlds such as these is a dash to construct 3D reproductions of actual places in the real world in the hope of attracting people to buy goods and entertain themselves without an irksome journey to town. There is a virtual London in Second Life, with a 40,000-strong community, which according to its founder Debs Regent (or Debs Butler, as she is known offline) made a small profit last month, mainly from renting out shops and clubs. But at least five virtual versions of the capital have been built or are in the throes of construction by companies such as Twinity, NearGlobal and Microsoft, as well as by University College, London.

Vistors to Twinity can also enjoy virtual replicas of Berlin, Singapore and Miami. Earlier this month, the company hosted a virtual barbecue in (its recreation of) South Beach, Miami, while in a game of one-upmanship with the mayor of London, the company’s vehicle engineers have just built a (virtual) motorcycle that lets visitors tour the cities (without ever being required to wear a helmet).

For sheer ambition all these projects are dwarfed by Project X, the brainchild of Mike Fotoohi from Egham, Surrey, who intends to reproduce the entire planet as a virtual world in which members will be able to build replicas of their homes on the same street as in real life. Project X is still in closed beta and at the moment Fotoohi and his team have only finished building central New York and a few other places, but after merging the open source Openstreetmap – a free and open source editable map of the world – with publicly available satellite image mapping from the US government to produce a 3D skeleton of practically every road on the planet, users will be invited to take over the planet.

Fotoohi and his colleagues believe that virtual worlds – in which social media will integrate with a three dimensional web – have a great future. “We have only scratched the surface,” he says. “As bandwidth increases and technologies like ray tracing [simulating 3D effects] and video delivery become more realistic thanks to increasing processing power and faster connections then we will have worlds that will look very real in the future.

“Project X is the initial phase of what I believe will be the next generation of how people will use the internet.”

One feature being developed using mobile technology aims to synch the virtual and the real worlds – so that your avatar in a virtual world will follow you in real life wherever you go. “Shopkeepers who advertise their products in our virtual world can actually see customers attracted to their store as a result of that advert,” says Fotoohi. “This is something that has never been done before and for the first time you can measure accurately the pounds and dollars that you spend. The person who uses this system will also get a revenue share, which is great for the consumer and advertiser.”

The early virtual worlds, most of which have been grossly underperforming for their investors, according to Nic Mitham at KZero, found it difficult to establish their virtual brands in real life. Mitham now sees two trends. First, virtual worlds are changing from levying monthly subscriptions to charging small amounts for virtual goods, a practice made popular by FarmVille. The second driver, he says, is brands creating their own virtual worlds to sell their products. Virtual goods that carry real-life brands, Mitham says, have 10 times the buying power of virtual brands.

How big is the virtual revolution? Factor in games like FarmVille, massively multiplayer online games such as Entropia Universe and World of Warcraft and other virtual services and it is a case of pick your own number. Some unofficial estimates claim that virtual products are worth bn in the US and bn in Asia. This is a woeful underestimate since one part of Facebook, FarmVille, may soon be worth a billion and it is already capitalised at more than bn. In the future, too, the mobile phone, is likely to be a major incubator of virtual products.

FarmVille may one day be seen as a milestone in accustomising non-geeks to the idea of online currencies and virtual products. Virtual products have a particular attraction to businesses because beyond the cost infrastructure already in place, overheads are few and manufacturing costs zero. Carbon footprints become less of a concern, too. And in a recession, virtual worlds offer their colonists the chance of a cheap escape from everyday reality.

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On the Net, we really only have to deal with three main types of images: CompuServe GIF, JPEG, Bitmaps and now png. At the moment, those are the only three that are roundly supported by the major browsers. But what’s the difference between them? What does it mean if a GIF is interlaced or non-interlaced? Is a JPEG progressive because it enjoys art deco? Does a Bitmap actually offer directions somewhere? And the most often asked question:

When do I use a specific image format?

I’ve been meaning to write this article for a while. I offer it as a catch-all answer to the many questions I get about images and their use.

Image or Graphic?

Technically, neither. If you really want to be strict, computer pictures are files, the same way WORD documents or solitaire games are files. They’re all a bunch of ones and zeros all in a row. But we do have to communicate with one another so let’s decide. Image. We’ll use “image”. That seems to cover a wide enough topic range.

“Graphic” is more of an adjective, as in “graphic format.” You see, we denote images on the Internet by their graphic format. GIF is not the name of the image. GIF is the compression factors used to create the raster format set up by CompuServe.

So, they’re all images unless you’re talking about something specific.

44 Different Graphic Formats?

It does seem like a big number, doesn’t it? In reality, there are not 44 different graphic format names. Many of the 44 are different versions under the same compression umbrella, interlaced and non-interlaced GIF, for example. Before getting into where we get all 44, and there are more than that even, let me back-peddle for a moment.

There actually are only two basic methods for a computer to render, or store and display, an image. When you save an image in a specific format you are creating either a raster or meta/vector graphic format.

Raster

Raster image formats (RIFs) should be the most familiar to Internet users. A Raster format breaks the image into a series of colored dots called pixels. The number of ones and zeros (bits) used to create each pixel denotes the depth of color you can put into your images. If your pixel is denoted with only one bit-per-pixel then that pixel must be black or white. Why? Because that pixel can only be a one or a zero, on or off, black or white.

Bump that up to 4 bits-per-pixel and you’re able to set that colored dot to one of 16 colors. If you go even higher to 8 bits-per-pixel, you can save that colored dot at up to 256 different colors.

Does that number, 256 sound familiar to anyone? That’s the upper color level of a GIF image. Sure, you can go with less than 256 colors, but you cannot have over 256.

That’s why a GIF image doesn’t work overly well for photographs and larger images. There are a whole lot more than 256 colors in the world. Images can carry millions. But if you want smaller icon images, GIFs are the way to go.

Raster image formats can also save at 16, 24, and 32 bits-per-pixel. At the two highest levels, the pixels themselves can carry up to 16,777,216 different colors. The image looks great! Bitmaps saved at 24 bits-per-pixel are great quality images, but of course they also run about a megabyte per picture. There’s always a trade-off, isn’t there?

The three main Internet formats, GIF, JPEG, and Bitmap, are all Raster formats.

Some other Raster formats include the following:

• CLP Windows Clipart
• DCX ZOFT Paintbrush
• DIB OS/2 Warp format
• FPX Kodak’s FlashPic
• IMG GEM Paint format
• JIF JPEG Related Image format
• MAC MacPaint
• MSP MacPaint New Version
• PCT Macintosh PICT format
• PCX ZSoft Paintbrush
• PPM Portable Pixel Map (UNIX)
• PSP Paint Shop Pro format
• RAW Unencoded image format
• RLE Run-Length Encoding

(Used to lower image bit rates)

• TIFF Aldus Corporation format
• WPG WordPerfect image format

Pixels and the Web

Since I brought up pixels, I thought now might be a pretty good time to talk about pixels and the Web. How much is too much? How many is too few?
There is a delicate balance between the crispness of a picture and the number of pixels needed to display it. Let’s say you have two images, each is 5 inches across and 3 inches down. One uses 300 pixels to span that five inches, the other uses 1500. Obviously, the one with 1500 uses smaller pixels. It is also the one that offers a more crisp, detailed look. The more pixels, the more detailed the image will be. Of course, the more pixels the more bytes the image will take up.

So, how much is enough? That depends on whom you are speaking to, and right now you’re speaking to me. I always go with 100 pixels per inch. That creates a ten-thousand pixel square inch. I’ve found that allows for a pretty crisp image without going overboard on the bytes. It also allows some leeway to increase or decrease the size of the image and not mess it up too much.

The lowest I’d go is 72 pixels per inch, the agreed upon low end of the image scale. In terms of pixels per square inch, it’s a whale of a drop to 5184. Try that. See if you like it, but I think you’ll find that lower definition monitors really play havoc with the image.

Meta/Vector Image Formats

You may not have heard of this type of image formatting, not that you had heard of Raster, either. This formatting falls into a lot of proprietary formats, formats made for specific programs. CorelDraw (CDR), Hewlett-Packard Graphics Language (HGL), and Windows Metafiles (EMF) are a few examples.

Where the Meta/Vector formats have it over Raster is that they are more than a simple grid of colored dots. They’re actual vectors of data stored in mathematical formats rather than bits of colored dots. This allows for a strange shaping of colors and images that can be perfectly cropped on an arc. A squared-off map of dots cannot produce that arc as well. In addition, since the information is encoded in vectors, Meta/Vector image formats can be blown up or down (a property known as “scalability”) without looking jagged or crowded (a property known as “pixelating”).

So that I do not receive e-mail from those in the computer image know, there is a difference in Meta and Vector formats. Vector formats can contain only vector data whereas Meta files, as is implied by the name, can contain multiple formats. This means there can be a lovely Bitmap plopped right in the middle of your Windows Meta file. You’ll never know or see the difference but, there it is. I’m just trying to keep everybody happy.

The following sections offer examples of the image formats discussed here. The images are all from my wife’s and my trip to Turkey in the summer of 1998. It was a wonderful time in a wonderful country.

The images are large on purpose to show the effects of the format.

What’s A Bitmap?

I get that question a lot. Usually it’s followed with “How come it only works on Microsoft Internet Explorer?” The second question’s the easiest. Microsoft invented the Bitmap format. It would only make sense they would include it in their browser. Every time you boot up your PC, the majority of the images used in the process and on the desktop are Bitmaps.

Against what I said above, Bitmaps will display on all browsers, just not in the familiar < img SRC = " -- " / > format we’re all used to. I see Bitmaps used mostly as return images from PERL Common Gateway Interfaces (CGIs). A counter is a perfect example. Page counters that have that “odometer” effect () are Bitmap images created by the server, rather than as an inline image. Bitmaps are perfect for this process because they’re a simple series of colored dots. There’s nothing fancy to building them.

It’s actually a fairly simple process. In the script that runs the counter, you “build” each number for the counter to display. Note the counter is black and white. That’s only a one bit-per-pixel level image. To create the number zero in the counter above, you would build a grid 7 pixels wide by 10 pixels high. The pixels you want to remain black, you would denote as zero. Those you wanted white, you’d denote as one. Here’s what it looks like:

0 0 0 0 0 0 0
0 0 1 1 1 0 0
0 1 1 1 1 1 0
0 1 1 0 1 1 0
0 1 1 0 1 1 0
0 1 1 0 1 1 0
0 1 1 0 1 1 0
0 1 1 1 1 1 0
0 0 1 1 1 0 0
0 0 0 0 0 0 0

See the number zero in the graph above? I made it red so it would stand out a bit more. You create one of those patterns for the numbers 0 through 9. The PERL script then returns the Bitmap image representing the numbers and you get that neat little odometer effect. That’s the concept of a Bitmap. A grid of colored points. The more bits per pixel, the more fancy the Bitmap can be.

Bitmaps are good images, but they’re not great. If you’ve played with Bitmaps versus any other image formats, you might have noticed that the Bitmap format creates images that are a little heavy on the bytes. The reason is that the Bitmap format is not very efficient at storing data. What you see is pretty much what you get, one series of bits stacked on top of another.

Compression

I said above that a Bitmap was a simple series of pixels all stacked up. But the same image saved in GIF or JPEG format uses less bytes to make up the file. How? Compression.

“Compression” is a computer term that represents a variety of mathematical formats used to compress an image’s byte size. Let’s say you have an image where the upper right-hand corner has four pixels all the same color. Why not find a way to make those four pixels into one? That would cut down the number of bytes by three-fourths, at least in the one corner. That’s a compression factor.

Bitmaps can be compressed to a point. The process is called “run-length encoding.” Runs of pixels that are all the same color are all combined into one pixel. The longer the run of pixels, the more compression. Bitmaps with little detail or color variance will really compress. Those with a great deal of detail don’t offer much in the way of compression. Bitmaps that use the run-length encoding can carry either the common “.bmp” extension or “.rle”. Another difference between the two files is that the common Bitmap can accept 16 million different colors per pixel. Saving the same image in run-length encoding knocks the bits-per-pixel down to 8. That locks the level of color in at no more than 256. That’s even more compression of bytes to boot.

So, why not create a single pixel when all of the colors are close? You could even lower the number of colors available so that you would have a better chance of the pixels being close in color. Good idea. The people at CompuServe felt the same way.

The GIF Image Formats

So, why wasn’t the Bitmap chosen as the King of all Internet Images? Because Bill Gates hadn’t yet gotten into the fold when the earliest browsers started running inline images. I don’t mean to be flippant either; I truly believe that.

GIF, which stands for “Graphic Interchange Format,” was first standardized in 1987 by CompuServe, although the patent for the algorithm (mathematical formula) used to create GIF compression actually belongs to Unisys. The first format of GIF used on the Web was called GIF87a, representing its year and version. It saved images at 8 pits-per-pixel, capping the color level at 256. That 8-bit level allowed the image to work across multiple server styles, including CompuServe, TCP/IP, and AOL. It was a graphic for all seasons, so to speak.

CompuServe updated the GIF format in 1989 to include animation, transparency, and interlacing. They called the new format, you guessed it: GIF89a.

There’s no discernable difference between a basic (known as non-interlaced) GIF in 87 and 89 formats.Even the bytes are the same. It’s the transparency, animation, and non-interlacing additions to GIF89a that really set it apart. Let’s look at each one.

Animation

I remember when animation really came into the mainstream of Web page development. I was deluged with e-mail asking how to do it. There’s been a tutorial up for a while now at http://www.htmlgoodies.com/tutors/animate.html. Stop by and see it for instruction on how to create the animations yourself. Here, we’re going to quickly discuss the concepts of how it all works.

What you are seeing in that example are 12 different images, each set one “hour” farther ahead than the one before it. Animate them all in a row and you get that stopwatch effect.

The concept of GIF89a animation is much the same as a picture book with small animation cells in each corner. Flip the pages and the images appear to move. Here, you have the ability to set the cell’s (technically called an “animation frame”) movement speed in 1/100ths of a second. An internal clock embedded right into the GIF keeps count and flips the image when the time comes.

The animation process has been bettered along the way by companies who have found their own method of compressing the GIFs further. As you watch an animation you might notice that very little changes from frame to frame. So, why put up a whole new GIF image if only a small section of the frame needs to be changed? That’s the key to some of the newer compression factors in GIF animation. Less changing means fewer bytes.

Transparency

Again, if you’d like a how-to, I have one you for you at http://www.htmlgoodies.com/tutors/transpar.html. A transparent GIF is fun but limited in that only one color of the 256-shade palette can be made transparent.

As you can see, the bytes came out the same after the image was put through the transparency filter. The process is best described as similar to the weather forecaster on your local news. Each night they stand in front of a big green (sometimes blue) screen and deliver the weather while that blue or green behind them is “keyed” out and replaced by another source. In the case of the weather forecaster, it’s usually a large map with lots of Ls and Hs.

The process in television is called a “chroma key.” A computer is told to hone in on a specific color, let’s say it’s green. Chroma key screens are usually green because it’s the color least likely to be found in human skin tones. You don’t want to use a blue screen and then chroma out someone’s pretty blue eyes. That chroma (color) is then “erased” and replaced by another image.

Think of that in terms of a transparent GIF. There are only 256 colors available in the GIF. The computer is told to hone in on one of them. It’s done by choosing a particular red/green/blue shade already found in the image and blanking it out. The color is basically dropped from the palette that makes up the image. Thus whatever is behind it shows through.

The shape is still there though. Try this: Get an image with a transparent background and alter its height and width in your HTML code. You’ll see what should be the transparent color seeping through.

Any color that’s found in the GIF can be made transparent, not just the color in the background. If the background of the image is speckled then the transparency is going to be speckled. If you cut out the color blue in the background, and that color also appears in the middle of the image, it too will be made transparent.

When I put together a transparent image, I make the image first, then copy and paste it onto a slightly larger square. That square is the most hideous green I can mix up. I’m sure it doesn’t appear in the image. That way only the background around the image will become clear.

Interlaced vs. Non-Interlaced GIF

The GIF images of me playing the Turkish Sitar were non-interlaced format images. This is what is meant when someone refers to a “normal” GIF or just “GIF”.

When you do NOT interlace an image, you fill it in from the top to the bottom, one line after another.

Hopefully, you’re on a slower connection computer so you got the full effect of waiting for the image to come in. It can be torture sometimes. That’s where the brilliant Interlaced GIF89a idea came from.

Interlacing is the concept of filling in every other line of data, then going back to the top and doing it all again, filling in the lines you skipped. Your television works that way. The effect on a computer monitor is that the graphic appears blurry at first and then sharpens up as the other lines fill in. That allows your viewer to at least get an idea of what’s coming up rather than waiting for the entire image, line by line.

JPEG Image Formats

JPEG is a compression algorithm developed by the people the format is named after, the Joint Photographic Experts Group. JPEG’s big selling point is that its compression factor stores the image on the hard drive in less bytes than the image is when it actually displays. The Web took to the format straightaway because not only did the image store in fewer bytes, it transferred in fewer bytes. As the Internet adage goes, the pipeline isn’t getting any bigger so we need to make what is traveling through it smaller.

For a long while, GIF ruled the Internet roost. I was one of the people who didn’t really like this new JPEG format when it came out. It was less grainy than GIF, but it also caused computers without a decent amount of memory to crash the browser. (JPEGs have to be “blown up” to their full size. That takes some memory.) There was a time when people only had 8 or 4 megs or memory in their boxes. Really. It was way back in the Dark Ages.

JPEGs are “lossy.” That’s a term that means you trade-off detail in the displayed picture for a smaller storage file. I always save my JPEGs at 50% or medium compression.

The difference between the 1% and 50% compression is not too bad, but the drop in bytes is impressive. The numbers I am showing are storage numbers, the amount of hard drive space the image takes up.

You’ve probably already surmised that 50% compression means that 50% of the image is included in the algorithm. If you don’t put a 50% compressed image next to an exact duplicate image at 1% compression, it looks pretty good. But what about that 99% compression image? It looks horrible, but it’s great for teaching. Look at it again. See how it appears to be made of blocks? That’s what’s meant by lossy. Bytes are lost at the expense of detail. You can see where the compression algorithm found groups of pixels that all appeared to be close in color and just grouped them all together as one. You might be hard pressed to figure out what the image was actually showing if I didn’t tell you.

Progressive JPEGs

You can almost guess what this is all about. A progressive JPEG works a lot like the interlaced GIF89a by filling in every other line, then returning to the top of the image to fill in the remainder.

Obviously, here’s where bumping up the compression does not pay off. Rule of thumb: If you’re going to use progressive JPEG, keep the compression up high, 75% or better.

Portable Network Graphics (PNG)

Portable Network Graphics (PNG) is a bitmapped image format that employs lossless data compression. PNG was created to improve upon and replace GIF (Graphics Interchange Format) as an image-file format not requiring a patent license. It is spelled out as P-N-G. The PNG acronym is optionally recursive, unofficially standing for “PNG’s Not GIF”.

PNG supports palette-based (palettes of 24-bit RGB or 32-bit RGBA colors), greyscale, RGB, or RGBA images. PNG was designed for transferring images on the Internet, not professional graphics, and so does not support other color spaces (such as CMYK).

PNG files nearly always use file extension “PNG” or “png” and are assigned MIME media type “image/png”; it was approved for this use by The Internet Engineering Steering Group on October 14, 1996.

Reader’s Image Questions

Which image do I use where?

There’s just not a good answer to this question. No matter what I say, someone else can give you just as compelling a reason why you should do the opposite. I’ll tell you the rules I follow:

• Small images, like icons and buttons: GIF (usually non-interlaced)
• Line art, grayscale (black and white), cartoons: GIF (usually non-interlaced)
• Scanned images and photographs: JPEG. (I prefer sequential. I’m not a fan of progressive.)
• Large images or images with a lot of detail: JPEG (I prefer sequential)

That said, I also follow the thinking, “Do people really need to see this image?” Can I get away with text rather than an image link? Can I make links to images allowing the viewer to choose whether to look or not? The fewer images I have on a page, the faster it comes in. I also attempt to have the same images across multiple pages, if possible. That way the viewer only has to wait once. After that, the images are in the cache and they pop right up.

How do I save in these formats?

You have to have an image editor. I own three. Most of my graphic work for the Web is done in Photoshop. I do that because Photoshop is shareware and you can get your hands on the same copy I have. That way I know if I can do it, you can do it.

To get these formats, you need to make a point of saving in these formats. When your image editor is open and you have an image you wish to save, always choose SAVE AS from the FILE menu. You’ll get a dialogue box that asks where you’d like to save the image. Better yet, somewhere on that dialogue box is the opportunity for you to choose a different image format. Let’s say you choose GIF. Keep looking. Somewhere on the same dialogue box will be an OPTIONS button (or something close). That’s where you’ll choose 87a or 89a, interlaced or non-interlaced, formats.

If you choose JPEG, you’ll get the option of choosing the compression rate. You may not get to play with the sliding scale I get. You may only get a series of compression choices, high, medium, low, etc. Go high.

Do you edit and create images in GIF or JPEG?

Neither. I always edit in the Photoshop or Bitmap format. Others have told me that image creation and editing should only be done in a Vector format. Either way, make a point of editing with large images. The larger the image, the better chance you have of making that perfect crop. Edit at the highest color level the image program will allow. You can always resize and save to a low-byte format after you’ve finished creating the file.

Recently I got a chance to see Avatar in digital 3D. The movie was a great viewing experience and I was completely on the Earth-like moon of Pandora every step of the way.

The movie has set a milestone in the film industry, the same way that Star Wars, E.T. & Jurassic Park did. In Avatar the animation looks so real that you feel like being on Pandora.

A story told from the heart

Aside from the special effects, Avatar also has a story line that told from heart and makes you think about our own planet Earth. The scene like the army distroying the big tree which is a shelter of the species on planet Pandora, reminds you about the dead trees on our own earth.

It intoduces you with the future, where We may end up on another moon like Pandora trying to steal resources. The story also points towards the America’s attitude towards rest of the world.

The movie takes us to the world of Pandora, a moon that orbits the giant planet Polyphemus in Alpha Centauri-A, our nearest star system. The year is 2154, when Earthlings have figured out how to travel through distant space, and need to for the energy needs. Cameron’s attention to detail in this movie’s each frame is just amezing.

Pandora has got a great amount of valuable mineral, but is also home to the Na’vi, an indigenous people who are blue, around eight feet tall, and have hair that acts like a plug and play USB device to all the animals with which they share a bond — viperwolves, hexapedes and the horrible leonopteryx, which looks like a giant, flying reptile. So cute! Isnt it?

The rainforest world of Pandora is why you need to see “Avatar” on the big screen and in 3D. The movie truly immerses you in this strangely familiar planet.

The Indian connection

Well, The movie name “Avatar” reminds me about the hindu religious belif about bhagvan Vishnu taking a “Avatar” (appearing on earth by taking birth as normal human being to save the earth from bad boys..). As per Hindu mythology, Vishnu has taken 10 avataars (DashAvatars) till date.

In the movie “Avatar”, the hero also takes a “Avatar” on Pandora to save the planet and the native people. Wondering who will save earth and us.

Avatar: What’s the Future of Film? (DiscoveryNetworks)

James Cameron has been working on “Avatar” for four years and planning for 15, his first movie since 1997’s “Titanic,” is indeed a milestone.

The 3D experience

The 3D experience is at the heart of Avatar. To film the live-action sequences of Avatar, Cameron used a modified version of the Fusion camera. The new 3D camera creates an augmented-reality view for Cameron as he shoots, sensing its position on a motion-capture stage, then integrating the live actors into CG environments on the viewfinder. This immersive 3D brings a heightened believability to Avatar’s live-action sequences—gradually bringing viewers deeper into the exotic world of Pandora. In an early scene, Sully looks out the window as he flies over the giant trees and waterfalls of the jungle moon, and the depth afforded by the 3D perspective gives the planet mass and scale, making it as dizzyingly real for viewers as it is for him.

About 25 percent of the movie was created using traditional live performances on sets. The rest takes place in an entirely computer-generated world—combining performance capture with virtual environments that have never before been realized on film. Conjuring up this exotic world allowed Cameron to engage with hammerhead thanators, direhorses, pterodactyl-like banshees, hundreds of trees and plants, floating mountains and incredible landscapes, all created from scratch.

The swing camera and Motion-capture technology

Motion-capture technology is capable of recording a 360-degree view of performances, so actors must play scenes with no idea where the “camera” will eventually be. Cameron wanted to be able to see the actors moving within the virtual environments while still on the motion-capture stage (called the volume). So he challenged his virtual-production supervisor Glenn Derry to come up with a virtual camera that could show him a low-resolution view of Pandora as he shot the performances.

The swing camera is another of Avatar’s breakthrough technologies. The swing camera has no lens at all, only an LCD screen and markers that record its position and orientation within the volume relative to the actors. That position information is then run through an effects switcher, which feeds back low-resolution CG versions of both the actors and the environment of Pandora to the swing cam’s screen in real time.

Avatar: 3-D Delivers Depth, Not Gimmicks (DiscoveryNetworks)