I hadn't heard of this thing before. The examples on the web site make a pretty good case in their favor. But it's like any infommercial, where you try to curl your hair with the curl-o-lizer 2000 and it's not as easy as it seems on TV.

Practice makes perfect Chris.

I've seen the product and have trouble understanding what it does. Vector artwork is already optimized, so I don't see how it can reduce the file size of a well thought out, put-together Flash file.

>so I don't see how it can reduce the file size.

That's what's weird. It apparently does just that. I went through the samples and the quality was the same between the two files, but the loading time was almost half the size on the optimazed ones. I don't know if the regular flash movies are "rigged" or something. Like at the county fair.

Speaking of reducing file size (assuming that's the same as optimizing)--I've had about 50% luck with reducing the size of PDF documents by printing the PDF to a PostScript file, then Distilling that and creating a new PDF document. Sometimes works, sometimes don't. No idea why it would ever work.

*scratches head, mutters 'dang high-fangled computairs*

> printing the PDF to a PostScript file, then Distilling that and creating a new PDF

I do that when for some doggone reason Quark won't make a PDF of anything larger than 11" x 17". I join you in the muttering and head scratching Sam.

I have another optimizing-web-delivery-format question: what's up with SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics)????

Has anybody tried this?

Adobe claims it's the future of web graphics. But I haven't seen any samples of this SVG thing. Well... I guess I could just go to the section entitled "See SVG in action.!"

SVG is an XML format(same as (X)HTML, but it's convoluted to the point that if you want to do something useful, there's no way in hell you're going to handcode it. I'm not aware of any good tools for producing it, though I know I've run across a few programs, but haven't played with them.

If you want to keep up today with SVG developments, bookmark the recently-launched SVG.org.

A quick way to reduce the file size of a PDF that you may have edited is to simply do a SAVE AS...

When working with PDFs (cropping, appending pages, deleting pages, adding forms, etc.) a lot of cruft apparently gets built up in the file. A quick SAVE AS... re-optimizes the file and get's rid of the old stuff.

As for SVG, it has it's uses, but it really hasn't gone anywhere (along with PNGs and VRML, etc...) The only reason Adobe is hyping it is because they don't own Flash.

I think SVG could take over for static use at some point, but frankly, nobody seems to care about it right now, and I'm sure it's at least in part because nobody has produced a decent way to author it.

Somebody took the time to produce an entire site rendered in SVG a while back, just as proof of concept. Everybody pretty much said, "Meh," instead of taking it for what it was meant to be.

Optimaze is basically a product that uses what Flash already does. The Optimize tool of Flash does exactly the same thing that Optimaze does. Your movie has to have a lot of curves and tween animation for this product to do as it promises. One of the GREATEST ways to see this work, is to use Swift 3d, and create a 3d animation with lots of curves. It then reduces the quality of those curves slightly, and reduces the amount of equations that Flash has to process, thus reducing the file size. Hopefully I have explained this all correctly and easily, otherwise I look like a complete dumbass :D

Complete dumbass...