[interfacekit] Re: app server: why screen dump to png ?

> 
> A question:
> Looking through the cvs tree, I found that our app server will dump 
> the screen to png.... why is that? doesn't the original dump to tga? 
And, moreover, isn't easier to just use the tga translator (which we 
already have) to dump to tga, without linking pnglib to the appserver ?
I had a couple reasons. Compression with PNG is a good thing - I run 
BeOS at 1152x864, and every time I do a screenshot it automatically 
costs me 2.85 MB. I have plenty of disk space, but that still seems 
pretty expensive to me. Second, it was less work to dump to png because 
of the library - the interface to the library is not all that complex 
and I had some model code in Syllable's app_server. I did try to use 
translators, but there were issues with it that I didn't want to mess 
with - it was more trouble than it was worth. I also knew that by 
adding libpng to the tree, Mike Wilber could have a much easier time 
making a PNG translator. The TGA format I know little about, only has 
RLE encoding that isn't worth mentioning, and would've required much 
more work to implement. AFAIK, TGA isn't used for a whole lot anymore -
 mostly GIF, PNG, and JPEG. Hope this clears things up for ya.

--DarkWyrm

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