What is the APNG Project?
The APNG 1.0 specification was developed in 2004 by Stuart Parmenter,Vladimir Vukicevic and Andrew Smith. Since it’s inception, there have been other contributers and mention of this new format on Mozilla Labs, and other related open source communities. In November of 2007, PHUG, an open source community based of Toronto, Canada consisting of mostly design and development students, had the opportunity to meet with Andrew Smith at Seneca College. Based on this initial get together PHUG members decided to take an active role in contributing to the APNG open source project.
PHUG began running workshops, using Justin Dolske’s APNG Editor extension for Firefox 3 and Gran Paradiso, in order to produce a wide range of APNG samples and tutorials to demonstrate the possibilities of this new specification. The workshops generated enough attention within their design community that PHUG members decided to begin work on this site, the APNG Project.
Our goal is to educate both open source and commercial designers/developers on the benefits of using the APNG specification. As this project evolves we hope to build a community of designers/developers devoted to producing sample APNGs, tutorials, workshops, and more…
Related links:
http://www.phug.ca
http://backspacestudios.com/blog/index.php/category/apng/
http://littlesvr.ca/apng/apngedit.html
http://wiki.mozilla.org/APNG_Specification
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What is an APNG?
The Animated Portable Network Graphics (APNG) file format is an extension to the Portable Network Graphics (PNG) specification. It allows for animated PNG files that work similarly to animated GIF files, while retaining backward compatibility with non-animated PNG files and adding support for 8-bit transparency and 24-bit images.
Its main purpose is said to be in GUI and XUL application usage, but open usage on the Web is also expected.
The first frame on an APNG file is stored as a normal PNG stream, so most old PNG decoders will be able to display the first frame of an APNG file. The frame speed data and extra animation frames are stored in extra chunks (as provided for by the original PNG specification).
APNG competes with Multiple-image Network Graphics (MNG), a powerful format for bitmapped animations created by the same team as PNG. APNG’s advantage is the smaller library size and compatibility with older PNG implementations.
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APNG Requirements
Mozilla Firefox 3 [alpha 3]
Opera 9.5
KSquirrel 0.7.2
XnView 1.92
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Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animated_Portable_Network_Graphics
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apng
http://wiki.mozilla.org/APNG_Specification#Overview
