Here we are with a sunday night release.

Changes:

• Initialization fixes (creating images on mac mini doesn’t seem to crash, for one)
• Web export now shows progress
• Web export now shows ideal numbers of colors (if under 256), with a button to set it as current
• Web export: more dithering modes available
• Some small visual fixes here and there (especially there)

As usual, please update, test, and report your wonderful experience. Or other experiences.

Here’s a new update with a feature that’s been missing for long: web export with live compression preview. All powered by the great command line tools ImageMagick and AdvComp. ChocoFlop still only works in true color but you can now export and get the smallest possible files. If you are trying to get PNG files to get as small as possible, for example because like me you’re into mobile apps, then ChocoFlop will now be able to do the job. If you find a combination that gives you smaller PNG files I’d like to hear about it.

Since all the compression, quantization and dithering magic is done by ImageMagick, you’ll need ImageMagick installed. I thought about bundling if with the app but it’s ten times bigger than the app itself. So instead the app just tells you to download it and unzip it in on your disk. Maybe in a future version it will be able to download and unzip it automatically.

I also built an universal binary of advpng (part of the AdvanceComp project), which you can get here if you want to use it for other purposes. It’s also bundled in the app package now, much like dcRaw was previously. (Merci Gilles pour le build PowerPC ^_^)

Changes for this version:

• Save for web feature
• Clicking on the left area of the cancel button no longer enables/disables live preview
• No more ugly artifacts while resizing the window

As usual, update, enjoy and export lots of images.

PS: I have noticed that the current version of ChocoFlop seems to have serious issues on Intel cards (again…). And by issues I mean trying to create 1280×1024 document would just do nothing. I’ll try to fix this maybe tomorrow when I have time to play with this on my mac mini.

So here’s the easter release! No bunnies though but a few welcome improvements instead:

• Text can now be scaled correctly by dragging the handles. That makes it kinda usable (finally!)
• The color picker now displays a zoomed version in the lower left corner. Makes it easier to pick the color.
• Picking a color only on active layer on a text layer now works.
• Magic wand and color picker fixed when picking only active layer (picked dull colors bug)
• Text rendering should be faster and leave less artifacts (white borders or text rendered twice)
• Handles are now smaller by default, with still the ability to enable the large ones using the View menu.
• Betas now expire with a warning but let the user 30 days to update before really expiring.

The app is now 100kb smaller although it has a few new images, never hurts! So be happy and update now, it won’t waste your bandwidth.

Somehow the index.php file on this website was replaced by spam links. I am still investigating how this could have happened. This had happened already a few months ago but it was due to a flaw in the old wordpress 1.5.2 I was using. Now with the updated version I am not sure what’s wrong. So I just changed my passwords and asked dreamhost if they could provide with some logs.

Thanks go to Lon from MacUpdate for pointing this out