Just a quick posting to let folks know that Andrew Dent has released the v1.0beta3 version of PNGSlim, as of September 23, 2009. To download a copy of that updated tool, you may visit: http://people.bath.ac.uk/ea2aced/tech/png/pngslim10b3.zip.

This release includes (in Andrew’s own words):

- Update introduces first step in making the script a bit smarter and efficient.
- Bug fix, for setting the program path using the ‘App’ directory (from 1.0b2).
- Improved the routine for determining the optimum number of Huffman blocks, and the Deflate strategy used by pngout. It should be noticeably faster for large images, and may yield better compression in some cases.
- This is the first part of the script re-write, introducing improvements in readability and the addition of debug/ geek feedback in the Verbose mode (v=0/1).

I played around with it last night and this afternoon, and it is noticeably faster in its processing of files. Hooray! I also found that with about 8-10% of files that had previously been optimized using PNGSlim, the new version of the tool is finding 5-10 additional bytes to remove off those files. Not a HUGE improvement…but PNGSlim was already the best PNG optimization tool out there (in my opinion), and if it can make a few of the files it processes even a hair smaller, that is “positive yardage” and worth the effort, as far as I am concerned.

Enjoy, everyone! Thanks again, Andrew. Keep up the great work!

Posted by datonn on Thursday, September 24th, 2009 at 8:19 pm.