PNG: Current Status. The quality of PNG support in applications varies widely, but overall it is improving at a reasonable rate. Many applications now support both basic GIF-like transparency (palette-based with a single, fully transparent color index) and full alpha transparency (32-bit RGBA); a handful also support PNG's "RGBA palette" mode (8-bit with a multi-entry tRNS chunk). A number of high-end applications now support 16-bit color channels in PNG.
Support for gamma correction continues to be uneven, with many applications failing to honor the gamma information when reading images, and most of them not making a distinction between recording gamma-related information about the user's display (lossless) and modifying the image data directly (lossy). Compression support is also uneven, with a surprisingly large number of applications writing overly large palettes, misusing PNG's compression filters, and often providing no way of setting the maximum possible compression level.
An implausibly illustrated introduction to HTML5 Web Workers. oSkope visual search :: An intuitive search assistant for Amazon, Ebay, YouTube and Flickr. Flock, the New Browser on the Block. By Rob Hof Web browsers don't look much different than they did a decade ago, when Netscape Communications's initial stock offering catapulted software for navigating the Web into the public eye. You click on a site, look around, watch or listen to something, click somewhere else -- all by your lonesome self. Now, an upstart called Flock aims to change all that. On Oct. 5, the Palo Alto-based startup takes the wraps off what it's calling a "social browser.
" Unlike plain-vanilla browsers such as Microsoft's (MSFT) Internet Explorer, Flock's browser is built specifically for a new, emerging generation of Web users, one that isn't satisfied passively browsing media online. Flock hopes to turn the browser into a dashboard for collaborating, blogging, sharing photos, reveling in a raft of other group activities that have recently caught fire online (see BW, 9/26/05, "It's a Whole New Web"). "INCUMBENTS ARE VULNERABLE. " Another browser, Opera, has also gained, especially in Europe.