I am using Winstep Xtreme and like to make animated dock icons (png filmstrip). For this, I use GIMP to make the individual frames (separate png's), which I them turn into a png filmstrip using GIF Movie Gear.

Now, I noticed that when I use a png filmstrip on the dock that they become hazy. So, I checked this by compared a few png filmstrips on the dock with an individual frame also on the dock (side by side).

Both are same size and the individual frame (first png of filmstrip) is
clearly sharper than the png filmstrip (even when I stop the animation, so only the first individual frame is shown).

I have added two links, one to slot-machine-frame.png (individual first frame of the filmstrip) and one to slot-machine-filmstrip.png, as an example. Using them both side-by-side on the dock and shown at maximum size (256 pixels) you can most clearly see the difference in all areas of the picture yourself (even at smaller sizes).

I would like to know if you could improve this and make the filmstrip
png's as crispy and clear as the individual frame png's.

Links:
slot-machine-frame.png: http://i50.tinypic.com/35jxyk6.png
slot-machine-filmstrip.png: http://rocketdock.com/addon/icons/43287

Animated icons use *a lot* of memory, and they have to be cached in memory in order for the animations not to bog down your CPU. To minimize memory usage, each frame of an animated icon is automatically reduced in memory to 128x128 if it is larger than this.

Try using Photoshop to make a sharp 128x128 (per frame) version of your PNG strip.

Thanks for this information Jorge.

Just wondering why you limited a frame to 128 x 128 and not to 256 x 256 which can be set as the maximum size in Winstep.

You mention that animated icons use a lot of memory, so I took a look at my PNG strips.

Currently I have about 150 PNG strips in my collection (most of them self made). The size per PNG strip varies from 50 kB to 1.6 MB and the total size of the 150 PNG strips and 105 normal PNG icons (al in the same folder) is only 53 MB. So, even if I use all of them this will not consume much memory.

I have to admit that I make my PNG strips with the maximum supported 256 x 256 size in mind and keep the duration of the animation limited (one or two seconds, 5 seconds max).

So, considering:
- 256 x 256 is the maximum size available in the settings of Winstep
- non-animated icons do have a resolution of 256 x 256, resulting in a noticable difference in sharpness if you mix both on the same dock
- PNG strips do not necessarily have to be big in size (like in my case)
- PNG strips made up of 128x128 frames can still have an enormous number of frames and use a lot of memory,

I would really appreciate it if you could up the maximum resolution from 128x128 to 256x256 for PNG strips or at least provide this option (for instance in the Performance settings under the Advanced tab of Winstep, to make everybody happy).

Providing an option for this (disabled by default) might work.

The problem is that many users still bitch about memory usage for applications like Nexus (even though their web browsers use many times that amount to render a *single* web page), and they don't understand (or care) that memory usage depends on many factors, such as enabled effects, etc...

Those are also typically the users who go crazy with animated icons - and THEN they start bad mouthing the application for using a lot of memory.

There are also many animated icon strips which are absolutely HUGE. For instance, the Icy Water animation is 9.53 MB in size and is a 180x180 pixel animation with 301 frames!

GDI+ was never intended to work with bitmaps this large (in fact, even Windows Live Photo Gallery is unable to open the Icy Water bitmap) and I had to implement many work-arounds in the code to enable Winstep applications to use such large animations (mainly due to bugs in GDI+, some of which are Windows version dependent).

I would be very happy if the option is provided, disabled by default (as I can understand your concern). This also allows you to include a warning that the use of (many) large icon strips requires a lot of memory.

Looking forward to the update containing this option.

I think you will like to know I just added this feature (as a setting in the Performance vs. Memory Usage dialog) for next release.

Thank you very very much.
This is much appreciated.
Can't wait to try it out.