FoggyNoggin Software, makers of Cool Mac Apps

Apple and “resolution independence” are a hot topic right now. The talk has focused mainly the merits of vector-based art versus rasterized bitmaps. I don’t know enough about either to jump into the fray, so I won’t even try. What I do know is that developers will end up using both vectors and bitmaps whether they want to or not.

In Leopard, Apple nicely included a little command line utility that takes two TIFF images of differing resolutions and combines them. It first checks to see if the images can be combined (making sure the resolutions match up, etc.). It then compresses the resulting combined image. The problem with the utility is that it’s command line based, so you end up doing a lot of needless typing.

While working to update some of my apps to include resolution independence, I found myself dropping into the command line a lot. To save time, I whipped up a little utility called TIFFer. It’s basically a wrapper around the Apple utility, but I find it fits into my workflow much better. It’s freeware for any developers who might need it, so get it now.

[Caveat Emptor: This is a Leopard-only app, and I’ve only tested it on my machine. If it doesn’t work for you (and you’re running Leopard), please let me know.]