On Tue, Apr 11, 2000 at 09:13:40PM -0700, Karl Williams wrote:
>I would like to mention that there is another format that your organization
>might want to take an interest in. It is called ILBM , InterLeaved Bit Map,
The perhaps main problem with IFF/ILBM is that it simply isn't widely-supported.
The reason people still use GIF is that it is supported in nearly every web
browser today. People are (slowly) moving away from GIF, to PNG. I'd suppose
PNG has _much_ better compression ratios than IFF/ILBM, simply because computers
have become much quicker since the A500 days.
>I should mention
>the downside, that pictures that I have ported over are 5 bit (32 colors)
>converted over to GIF, thats the capacity of ILBMs - becuase of the nature
>of the Amiga computer in its low resolution state.
The AGA chipset lifted this limitation, BTW.
>Becuase I cant use GIF in my own programs becuase of the Unisys licence
>problem. I have to develop a program that reads ILBM the format. Its
>already
>been an undertaking project - so far. I plan to release my libraries as
>public domain.
While IFF/ILBM format could be useful (especially for interchanging graphics
files with the Amiga), I doubt it would be very useful for general use. For
that, we already have PNG. GIMP uses a library called libpng (which is free as
in GPL'ed), which doesn't have any patent restrictions or royalty fees either.
The bottom line: We already have PNG, which supports 8-, 24- and 32-bit modes
(alpha), so we would probably not gain anything _big_ by implementing IFF/ILBM.
However, nothing is lost either, and I remember looking _very_ hard for such a
program a couple of years ago :-)
/* Steinar */
