Moving images to the next level

Let’s start this week with a couple of software and technology announcements. The first is from the developer Dominic Szablewski. He has developed a simple, new image format. You will have heard of PNG, JPEG, MPEG, MOV and MP4, which he calls complex. Enter the Quite OK Image Format (QOI). Most of the older formats are closed, need libraries and a lot of computing power to implement and use.

– QOI is not quite as good as an optimised PNG encoder but it will generate lossless compressed images to a similar size, but at between 20-50 times faster encoding and 3-4 times faster decoding speeds. Even better this all fits into around 300 lines of C code with a one page spec, my favourite kind. It has been embraced by the Open-Source community and there are already plugins for Gimp, Paint.NET and XnView MP with more arriving. It has…