This Story Posted:
July 30th, 1999

 
 

[11:15 AM]
Mizer Optimizes JPEGs, GIFs, And HTML
Antimony Software has released an update to Mizer, their web optimization utility. Mizer will optimize HTML, aimed at users of WYSIWYG editors, JPEGs, and now GIFs. According to Antimony Software:

Mizer is the only tool that automatically optimizes your source and graphics, removing unneeded information to make files smaller for faster downloading, parsing, and rendering by browsers.

When actual Web page readership decreases exponentially with load time, you can't afford not to have the fastest Web pages as possible.

Just how much smaller and faster your Web pages could be would surprise you.

Web pages often contain as much unneeded information as they contain critical information. It can easily be as much as 50% dead weight and most often is over 20% for any given typical Web page.

This extra information that isn't needed for rendering the contents of your Web page, is introduced in many ways from the basic formatting of the HTML syntax to graphics applications that embed data unknown to you in image files.

Changes in version 1.7:

Implemented the first GIF optimization for Mizer. This is a basic and lossless optimizer for single image GIF files that corrects all common problems with saved GIF files such as extra palettes, redundant colors in palettes, higher bit-depths than required, and a higher version number of the GIF format than required for the file. As with the JPEG optimizer, results will vary depending on the source of the original file, but the end result will always be a GIF file that is as small as possible without changing the image data at all.

Additional mechanisms for GIF optimization are also planned, this is the just the initial one that handles the simple case and provides the basic architecture of the GIF optimizer.

Implemented additional preferences control so that all optimizers in Mizer, including the one for HTML source may be turned on and off. It can be used as JPEG optimizer, GIF optimizer, or HTML optimizer or any combination thereof now.

The update is free to registered users of Mizer, while the full version is priced at US$69.95. You can find more information on this product at the company's web site.

The Mac Observer Spin: Mizer is a potential boon to many developers seeking to use the power of a WYSIWYG editor, but still needing to reduce the file sizes of their web pages. With the added ability to optimize GIFs, this should be a popular tool with many Mac web developers.

Antimony Software