My time lately has been taken up by a fairly intensive project so I’ve neglected writing for a few weeks. But in this project I got a tip from Noah Rosenberg at happyMedium on an app I’d been overlooking for quite some time. That app is imageAlpha and it’s a companion to the wonderful app imageOptim that I’ve used for the past few years.
So what’s so great about imageAlpha?
On this project I was faced with some pretty hefty alpha PNGs and I was concerned with how I was going to handle loading them in, we won’t get into my nutty logic train on those but let’s just say I had a few over thought ideas.
“Why not just make them smaller?” My creative friend asked me, adding “You can just use imageAlpha for that.” For whatever reason I heard “Use imageOptim Jack” but of course I was already using that. Knowing little about imageAlpha I ended up getting a quick verbal overview and looked into it when I was back to my computer. And WHOA, this thing has some real horsepower wrapped up in a nice GUI. See the tools behind imageAlpha and imageOptim have existed before but you have to be really careful in scripting them via command line or you could get some less than favorable results.
You can read a lot more about the apps on the sites however I can tell you that this will be a huge deal in the near future judging all of the “responsive images” discussions I’ve seen floating around lately.
