[JDEV] Buddy Icon (Avatar) Proposal

[Jens Alfke]

On Thursday, August 30, 2001, at 04:53 PM, Julian Missig wrote:

> 50x50 is what AIM uses. The point of this was to easily support AIM's 
> Buddy
> Icons as well.

OK, that makes sense. I'll just squish 'em to 32x32 and thank the gods 
for bicubic scaling.

> It didn't seem worth it to support JPEG. When images are that small, 
> most
> people don't want them lossy to begin with.

It makes a big difference in data size. In my tests, JPEG images of 
faces with "medium" compression were about 1/4 the size of their PNG24 
equivalents and visually indistinguishable. The GIFs were tiny but 
looked like shit due to the 8-bit color table. I don't have the test 
images handy anymore, but it's easy to verify. (I used PhotoShop to 
generate all the image files.)

> This way icons can easily be changed when presence changes. I could very
> easily have one icon for available, one for away, one for dnd, etc.

You can still do that if it's stored on the server: just upload a new 
image right before sending the <presence> element. I don't see any 
drawback to this compared with having to send the image every time 
someone asks for it. As soon as more than one buddy requests the image 
you've saved on bandwidth.

--Jens