Smush.it is getting more and more buzz all over the internets. Now there's even a song about it! Me and Nicole are pretty busy answering email, but a little slow to document the thing, I though I should at least shed some light on how the tool works by using some of the presentations.
What the tool does can be summarized in these steps:
- Turn GIFs into PNG8. Results are reported only if there's a saving, the file name then becomes
source.gif.png. Smush.it uses imagemagick to do the conversion and then pngcrush to crush the pngs - Crush PNGs using pngcrush
- Strip JPEG metadata and make them progressive, using jpegtran
- GIF animations: use gifsicle to remove pixels that don't change from one frame to another
This has been documented here on developer.yahoo.com together with the command line tools and options.
So all the tool does is run the appropriate command for each file type. Easy as that 😉 All the tools mentioned are free open-source and available on all operating systems, including Windows.
Here are some presentations on slideshare that might explain things a little more:
- High-perf web sites - PHP Quebec Montreal, March 2008
- 7 mistakes in image optimization - O'Reilly's Velocity, SFO, June 2008
- Ajax Experience, Boston, earlier this week. Draft 1, Draft 2. The final and shortest version is below. It doesn't say much but the talk was just 5 minutes and included a demo. It's weird how little you can say in 5 minutes, I mean just "hello, my name, ... welcome to blah, blah..." is 20 seconds
Happy smushing!
"Smush it! Smush it real good..." - hothardware.com 😉
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