PNGCrusher: Make Your Web Graphics Smaller

I love it when I find a little freeware application that makes my life easier. Anyone who works with graphics on the web is likely working with PNG files, like a GIF file (without the silly Compuserve patent nonsense) with good compression (like JPG). Aaron Madon-Kay has created a simple Applescript application bash script wrapped with Platypus called PNGCrusher that takes advantage of the open source software OptiPNG to provide excellent compression in your PNG graphics files.

That's all just way of saying this: PNGCrusher will provide significant compression your PNG files and can save you a lot of bandwidth (and therefore, money). I've been using the PNG format more and more (abandoning GIF and JPG) for my web work. This software gives me another great reason to use only PNG.

The graphic used for this post was 80K when saved from Photoshop but 12K after being processed by PNGCrusher. There is very little human-eye detectable difference between the two. Color me impressed.