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I thought everything was going well with PNGGauntlet 2 until I got a comment reporting some problems with it at the beginning of the month. It’s taken me almost a month to get a chance to sit down and check out the problem (August is always really busy since people are usually visiting). When I started digging into the code, I realized that I hadn’t actually made some key changes to the code that I thought I had made, and as a consequence, a lot of PNGGauntlet didn’t actually work. For example, the whole PNGOUT Options panel wasn’t actually wired up to anything, and the “Open With” functionality I added in 2.0.1 didn’t actually call the right functions, and didn’t work either. Wow. This is what I get for not having tests set up for this code (it was written before I understood how to write tests). So it is with great humility that I submit to you PNGGauntlet 2.0.2, which I have quite a bit more confidence in. Hopefully most people were using just default settings (like I usually do) and weren’t bitten too bad by the problems in the earlier versions. As usual, you can check out the full list of fixes.

Interestingly, one of the two problems in the original comment that got me working on PNGGauntlet again wasn’t actually a PNGGauntlet or PNGOUT bug. It turns out that Photoshop, Gimp, and Paint Shop Pro all don’t support 8-bit PNGs that have an alpha channel. Who knew? I tend to use either Fireworks or Paint.NET, which both support 8-bit PNGs completely, so I never knew.

Just a quick update, I just uploaded a new version of PNGGauntlet that fixes a couple of annoying bugs, as well as making it so you can use the “Open With” menu to open files in PNGGauntlet. Just right click, select “Open With”, select “Choose Default Program”, and browse for PNGGauntlet.exe in its install folder. Be sure to uncheck “Always use the selected program to open this kind of file” if you want PNGGauntlet to just show up in the menu instead of always opening for that type of file.

Grab the updated file from the PNGGauntlet homepage and enjoy your smaller PNGs.

It’s been about three years since I last released an update to PNGGauntlet. This PNG image optimizing tool has been very popular, but has been sorely in need of a refresh. Today I’m excited to announce a major update, PNGGauntlet 2.0.

The most important new feature of PNGGauntlet 2.0 is that it runs on .NET 2.0 (and 3.0, and 3.5). This means that Windows Vista users can just install it without having to download anything else. This has also allowed me to use some more modern .NET features in order to smooth out the program’s internals. I’ve also done a few more things to make PNGGauntlet explicitly compatible with Vista, including the new, high resolution gauntlet icon.

The UI is pretty different, making better use of space and finally making every single PNGOUT option accessible. Check out the old 1.1 interface to compare. You’ll see that most of the controls have been moved over to an “Advanced Options” window where you can tweak PNGOUT to your heart’s content. The main window has been greatly simplified and gives much better feedback on the compression job, with individual progress bars for each file, highlighting of the currently compressing file, and a status bar that keeps track of the total kilobytes you’ve saved.

The program itself has had a lot of bugs fixes and inefficiencies stomped out, and some less obvious features have been added. One of those is that dropping a directory onto PNGGauntlet will recursively add all the files in the directory (and its subdirectories) to the current optimization job. Also, you can copy (Ctrl-C) files in Windows Explorer and paste (Ctrl-V) them into PNGGauntlet. This should make it much easier to get the files you want into the app. If you want to see everything that’s changed, take a look at the full changelog.

I wrote PNGGauntlet nearly 5 years ago as my very first C# program (and my first Windows app!). At the time, I wanted to be able to run PNGOUT (a commandline tool for optimizing PNGs) and pngrewrite (another commandline tool that could mess with PNG palettes to make PNGOUT more effective) together on large sets of PNG images easily. Then PNGOUT added the features of pngrewrite and I no longer needed that, so I modified PNGGauntlet to run PNGOUT multiple times in order to search for the smallest file size. Since then, PNGOUT has added that feature too. So now PNGGauntlet is really just a fancy GUI for running PNGOUT.

I never really intended for PNGGauntlet to be anything more than a learning exercise for me, but it’s become moderately popular, so I felt obliged to update it (and make it easy for me to install on my own Vista systems). However, in the intervening time Ken Silverman (creator of PNGOUT) has released his own commercial PNGOUT GUI, called PNGOUTWin. I haven’t looked at it too closely, but the program runs PNGOUT in a much more elegant way, and can even compress multiple files at once to take advantage of modern multicore processors. It’s only $15, so I suggest you pick it up if you use PNGOUT or PNGGauntlet a lot. It’s also nice to see that Ken has released Linux and Mac OS X versions of PNGOUT, so I can use it at work too!

Thanks to everyone who’s been emailing me asking about PNGGauntlet and giving me suggestions. I hope this is what you were wanting.

I read today that Xbox.com had gotten a redesign. I had hoped it wouldn’t impact the friends list page, which XBList uses to get its friend info, but unfortunately it had. The friends list is now split into 16-friend chunks. That meant I had some work ahead of me to make sure XBList could work with the new format. I’m pleased to announce that after only a few hours of work, XBList 3.2.0 has been released, which works just fine with the new site. I’m glad that all the refactoring work I had put into the software in the past allowed me to make a change like that without breaking anything. There is now the possibility of some slight weirdness if a friend changes status in the split-second between XBList loading one page and another, but I don’t think much can be done about that.

Of course, I couldn’t just make the fix and call it a new release. I’ve neglected XBList in the last year as I’ve been deep into work and other projects, but I’ve been accumulating little fixes, and as long as I had the code open today I added a much-asked-for feature: Halo 3 integration. OK, it’s not the best integration, but there are now menu items that link straight to your friends’ Halo 3 Service Record page, and better yet, Halo 3 emblems are now loaded in preference to the old Halo 2 emblems. If your friend has both, they’ll just get the Halo 3 emblem. I was amazed at how many people on my friends list (who hadn’t had Halo 2 emblems) popped up with Halo 3 insignia once I finished the feature. I hope this is enough to tide people over for a while.

I also improved the detection of Xbox.com outages. They seem to be better now, but around December the site was down all the time, and now XBList will be pretty clear about when it’s Xbox.com’s fault that you can’t log in. Hopefully that’ll reduce some confusion.

Please pick up XBList 3.2.0 and let me know what you think! The full changelog may be of some interest also.

I’ve been sitting on this one for a while, but it’s finally time to push it out the door. XBList 3.1 doesn’t have any revolutionary changes, but it’s got a lot of polish and nice little fixes and features that are sure to make life better for XBList users. The most noticeable new enhancements are that I’ve gotten XBList to use your system default font now (this means Vista users get the lovely Segoe UI font), and the popup notifications have been transformed from Windows 95-style to Windows Vista style.

I also added a lot of little features people have been asking for. There are now options for XBList to be on top of all windows, to start up with Windows, and to start minimized. You can compose a new message to your friend by just double clicking their name. I’ve also fixed a bug where two people who share a computer couldn’t both run their own copies XBList.

This release also includes some nice features for Vista users. First, it includes a manifest, so there will be less compatibility warnings and such. Next, it’ll offer to fix your Internet Settings automatically so that signing in under Vista is smoother. I’ve also built a completely new installer using WiX, which is prettier, smaller, and more functional.

I encourage anyone who’s interested to look at the changelog for the full list of updates. One thing you might notice is that I’ve added some backend support for making a Windows Sidebar Gadget that displays your friends list. I can’t promise I’ll get around to it (I’ve had bad experiences with Gadgets before), but it’s nice to know the capability is there.

I really thought that by now I’d be announcing that XBList is totally obsolete, for two reasons. The first is Games For Windows - LIVE, which aims to bring the Xbox Live experience to PC games. I tried out the beta, and while it’s neat, there’s no indication Microsoft is coming out with an XBList-style application for the Windows desktop that’ll show you your friends. The second reason was the new Windows Messenger integration in the Spring Dashboard Update. I love this, but half my friends aren’t on Windows Messenger anyway, and I can’t see people’s Xbox status from Adium, Trillian, or Meebo, so I’ll keep using XBList to know who’s ready to play some Halo 3 (beta). I hope everyone else continues to find it useful as well.