Tim Samoff // Weblog (old)

June 16, 2003

Rant ~ High-speed internet and the demise of graphics optimization...

The situation. I am still using a 56kbps dial-up internet connection. Not all of the time, mind you. At work, I am cruising with a T1 connection. At home, though…slow. Before I moved out here, I did have a cable modem, but they’re just too expensive; hardly justifiable when I’m not really doing any freelance work anymore. But, I digress.

The problem. Too many people are diving into internet design with fast connections. But, why is this a problem? These people have no idea what it’s like to wait for a page with a 500kb footprint to download through a phone line running at 56,000 baud per second (let alone trying to receive an e-mail with a 2MB picture attached!).

1984. I began using the “internet” (or one of the first “public” forms of it) when its backbone consisted of a handful of loosely knit, privately run Bulletin Board Systems (BBS). There were no graphics. Text took long enough to load onto a computer screen and application file-sizes ranged from 500 bytes to 700k (at most). If someone, who had posted a new program on a BBS, wanted people to download it, they would try their hardest to keep the file-size low.

1992. I started working at a company (now defunct) that would soon begin making computer games. At that time, we made custom sound banks for synthesizers and for computers, the only product we made, was something called AudioClips^TM ( our first license – scroll down to #5 “Sound” ). AudioClips were sounds that people could load onto their Mac or PC and assign to various system events with a program called SoundMaster^TM (on the Mac) and Whoop It Up!^TM (on a PC). The thing is, the current Mac OS was System 6.0.1 and PCs, if not running straight DOS, were chugging away with Windows 3.1. These were slow computers with negligable RAM and very small hard drives. We shipped our products on 3.5” floppy disks and the goal was to use as few disks in our packaging as possible.

1994. Our first forray into more graphical computer software began with screen savers. We made screen savers based on the Twilight Zone, Saturday Night Live, I Love Lucy, T2, etc. But, even then, we were still limited to creating our graphics within a 256-color palette (not easy when you want to render a realistic morphing T-1000). This is when I became involved with a program called DeBabelizer from Equilibrium. DeBabelizer is the King Kong of graphics optimization. It can create custom palettes, dither graphics to any variation of color modes, change pixel-depth and resolution in the blink of an eye, and best of all…it was the first graphics program that did batch-processing! I completely fell in love with this program. When we did start making games, changing the pixel-depth of thousands of frames of animation became but a click of a button. At one point, Equilibrium even had a page that I wrote for them in the “Solutions” section of their website. (If you’d like, you can read a “dummied-down” article that I wrote in 1997 for Animation World Magazine that sort of relates to this subject.)

2003. These days, there are plenty of tools that help people to optimize graphics (like ProJPREG, a Photoshop plugin by BoxTop Software that is very good), but not as many people with slow-speed internet connections. Newbies just don’t have to suffer through the rigmaroles that some of us “old-timers” did. There is no longer an “apprenticeship” of mulimedia design. I’d love to know the percentage of designers within this emmerging anti-end-user-school-of-thought that even know why one would have to create a 224-color palette for a graphic when working in Windows 8-bit color mode.

2003. Still waiting…

Posted at 10:03 am

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