xhtml | css | DesignThe republic of Jens Wedin (with me as the president)

Last year I asked a friend of mine to make a GUI for an dos application called Pngquant. A few weeks ago a got an comment about updating the GUI so I asked my friend Per if he help me out. When he was done we also decided to give the GUI a name, Manfred. Manfred is my third name if you ask. The only thing that is added to this version is “ordered” option. This helps the PNG image to look a bit better but also makes it smaller (KB). When we released the first version there was no GUI for keeping an 8 bits (256 colours) image with full transparency. Now, this feature has been added in the release of Fireworks 8. I made some tests to compare the programs. If you have Fireworks I think you should that program, it does make the image look better but a bit larger. Otherwise, Manfred (Pngquant really) will do the work quite nicely.

• The post about the pngquant GUI
• Fireworks versus pngquant (do not work for IE)

## Install instructions

1. Download the GUI and unzip it somewhere
2. Download Pngquant from the their site. (Windows binaries)
3. Download .net runtime environment from MS. (you might already have this)
4. Put the Pngquant in your $PATH (In WinXP that is C:windows/system32/)
5. You are good to go.

Just noted that I have added 200 posts to this site, this is the 201 post. Happy me. There has been 164 comments (except the thousands of spam comments I have deleted through the years), the goal for this year is to have more comments than posts, so come everyone and help me out.

Just saw that WaSP (Web standards project) has put up their new site. Looks nice. I like the “Skip to content” link. The site is a bit shaky right now, so I´ll come back later. One of the people, Malarky (stuff and nonsense) who has built the site has article about the redesign.

• The Web Standards Project
• Stuff and nonsense

The upcoming Opera 9 is looking great, the lastest public beta now passes the complex CSS test Acid2, good working.

• Opera Desktop Team
• Screenshots from different Opera versions
• The Acid2 test

An Swedish company (Funka.nu) has together with the Swedish Riksdag (something like the parliament) developed standard icons to use freely. Standards are good, right? But standard icons, is this really any good? First of all, I think the icons used do not look any good. They are only one size, why not a vector format so the sites can use the size they want, check out the Tango project as an example. They say that it is OK to change the colours. But they are also inconsistent , mostly with the PDF document, the word document icon and the rest. Also check out the famfamfam icons, they look good, I understand most of them, and they look great. Maybe it would have been better if they could agree on a metaphor for an icon, then let the designer decide how they would look like.

What do think?

• Standard icons at Funk.nu (Swedish)
• The Swedish Riksdag (Swedish)
• The Tango project
• Famfamfam

Even a publishing system can fail. So, today’s lesson is, always validate.