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PNG format co-designer Glenn Randers-Pehrson has died
- ioquatix 8y agoOh wow. I was working with Glenn on GitHub and I didn't know. https://github.com/glennrp/libpng/pull/177 https://github.com/glennrp/libpng/pull/177 was my last interaction with him. He seemed to really care about libpng and making it better.
- joe_momma 8y agoWas first exposed to .PNG in Macromedia Fireworks. Have loved it more than the other extensions ever since.
- oliveshell 8y agoMe too— I thought it was cool how Fireworks used PNG as its native format, with extra metadata to keep layers and text editable. Thanks Glenn; I still export to PNG all the time.
- Mononokay 8y agoHuh, right next to the death of Todd Boll. Really sad day today.
- devwastaken 8y agoPNG is a really underappreciated format. It's amazing how an 8-bit PNG can make a lot of icons super small without losing quality. Without PNG being held up as open software we would most likely not have the graphics we take for granted now. I don't know him as a human being, but I would hope he is a great one, too. Thank you Glenn.
- tinus_hn 8y agoPNG is basically zip with some extra tricks. The advantage in PNG is not how well it compresses.
- vanderZwan 8y ago> PNG is basically zip with some extra tricks. Sure, if with "some extra tricks" you mean "four relatively simple scanline filters[0] that nevertheless Paretro Principle[1] the heck out of more complex forms of lossless compression". Especially Paeth is amazing in how it makes gradients so much cheaper than naive approaches with such a simple formula. Similarly relying on DEFLATE is smart too, as that means any improvement to that format can be safely applied to PNG as well, like with zopflipng[1]. [0] https://www.w3.org/TR/PNG-Filters.html https://www.w3.org/TR/PNG-Filters.html [1] https://github.com/google/zopfli/blob/master/README.zopflipng https://github.com/google/zopfli/blob/master/README.zopflipn...
- tinus_hn 8y agoSure it’s smart and well thought-out. It’s not worth the Nobel prize though. The achievement in PNG is in beating the de facto standard when it was created, GIF. That’s pretty difficult because GIF is almost good enough, except for features that are hard to explain to non technical people. They don’t care that GIF was covered by software patents and they don’t know about 1 bit transparency and color palettes. They know that GIF is supported in all software they care about, and that GIF has animation to boot.
- arunmp 8y agoI prefer PNGs to almost any other format in my documents, since they seem to be almost lossless and also dont bloat the size. Such a great work must surely be a product of a brilliant Mind. RIP Glenn Randers-Pehrson.
- a1369209993 8y ago> they seem to be almost lossless The should be just plain (completely) lossless unless your image encoder is doing something evil behind your back.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- gwbas1c 8y agoI thought there are "lossy" encoders that do things like dither and reduce the colorspace?
- gpvos 8y agoThere are, but those are not the ones one thinks of by default when talking about PNG. If they do, they should clearly tell you they are doing something nonstandard.
- classichasclass 8y agoI was always impressed at the level of legacy support in libpng. Even 1.0.x still gets security updates now and then. RIP and a job well done.
- edoceo 8y agoThis and Todd, can we get the black bar (or did I miss it?)
- acct1771 8y ago...
- maxst 8y agoRest in peace, Glenn.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- dopeboy 8y agoI've noticed a lot of us despair about whether we can contribute as an engineer as we get older. I didnt know Glenn but to be a badass coder and maintainer of hugely popular library at his age is truly inspirational. RIP.
- TwoBit 8y agoI don't like the way libpng dumps all the package code into a single directory. Internal headers, public headers, source, and samples.
- thelossfulmany 8y agoLosslessness at rest we salute you.
- chris_wot 8y agoThe very first PNG image is no more. It points to this: http://homepages.rpi.edu/~randeg/paleo_pngs.html http://homepages.rpi.edu/~randeg/paleo_pngs.html
- downandout 8y agoIs there some reason we don't have a black bar on HN for this? Given the ubiquity of the PNG format, I would think his death is deserving of it. RIP.
- SmellyGeekBoy 8y agoUsually they're for household names ("household" within our industry anyway). That said, maybe we'll get one once the admins wake up. :)
- PNGRandall 8y agoWe should probably cross cocks too; hey; it's all lossless.
- NL807 8y agoThanks for all the work Glenn.
- danso 8y agoThis appears to be his LinkedIn page: https://www.linkedin.com/in/glenn-randers-pehrson-77110a101/ https://www.linkedin.com/in/glenn-randers-pehrson-77110a101/ Started out as a geophysicist for a Texas oil company, then served in the military, then a number of physicist gigs with the government, including with the army and at Livermore Laboratory. His most recent gig is "(Volunteer) Software Developer and Maintainer" -- Jan 1995 - Present"