Update: OK, so it looks like there are still a few bugs, introduced by adding the parallel compression and the new compressors. Non-PNG files are being converted to PNG but keeping their original file names, and errors are popping up while parallel-compressing files. Sorry, I’ll have a 3.1.1 version out soon that addresses these. No, I didn’t “remove features” in favor of nonsensical behavior, these are all just bugs.

That’s not all that’s changed, however. The UI has been streamlined, leaving only the most essential options. Drop files on the app, hit Optimize, and don’t worry about the rest. However, if you want to tweak the compressors, there’s an all-new options panel that exposes every possible setting for each compressor. The PNGGauntlet website has also been overhauled with a much more modern look.

Before you ask, no, the new PNGGauntlet will not compress multiple images at once to make use of multicore processors. I cover this in the FAQ, but since Ken Silverman, PNGOUT’s author, provides a professional PNGOUT for Windows that’s multicore-optimized for only $15, I don’t want to compete by matching PNGOUTWin’s feature set. It’s absolutely not a matter of not knowing how to do it. And anyway, the individual compressors do a good job of using multiple cores on their own.

One question that deserves an answer is why there was no PNGGauntlet release in the last year and a half. The answer is essentially that I forgot about PNGGauntlet. The last release, 2.1.3, was in May of 2010. That December, I did some work on a new version of PNGGauntlet, incorporating the new compressors and slimming down the UI. After I’d done that, I decided that I wanted to overhaul the UI completely – it’s built with the old Windows Forms technology and a pretty rickety open source data table library, and I’ve always been embarrassed by how crude it looks. My plan was to use Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF), which was supposed to be the new way of developing UIs for .NET apps. However, I soon discovered that Microsoft’s WPF libraries don’t really give you a native-looking UI. Applications developed with WPF look kinda like Windows apps, but they’re off in a bunch of subtle ways that really bothered me. So I ended up starting to draw my own controls to match Windows 7 more closely. And after a while down that rathole, I sorta gave up and shelved the whole project in disgust.

Since then, I’ve actually switched to using my Macbook Air, in OS X, almost exclusively, and I almost never use my Windows machines. The prospect of developing Windows apps no longer interests me much, and I don’t really use PNGGauntlet anymore myself (I use the very nice Mac analogue ImageOptim). PNGGauntlet still worked, so it stayed out of my mind until @drewfreyling messaged me on Twitter asking about incorporating the latest version of PNGOUT into PNGGauntlet. I figured it would be pretty simple to do a minor update, but when I booted up my old desktop and took a look at the code, I found my mostly-completed update just waiting to be released. So, no new slick modern UI, but I was able to spend an hour finishing up what I had and release it as PNGGauntlet 3. Hopefully it’ll be a useful and welcome upgrade to both new and existing PNGGauntlet users.

After this update, I’ll be starting work on version 1.0, which should include some power user functionality that a few people have asked for, as well as some infrastructure changes that modernize how JSONView works with Firefox. Please fork the code on GitHub and contribute if you have something you want to add!

JSONView 0.6 fixed a couple of bugs around formatting text, especially when odd Unicode characters were present. Where previously JSONView would stop showing content after those characters, it now shows the Unicode escape sequence. Also, when there’s an error parsing a JSON document, the original document is displayed with its formatting intact, rather than squashed into a single line.

However, the most important bugfix is that disabling JSONView from the Addons page will un-do the “Include ‘application/json’ in the HTTP Accept header for requests” option. This is especially important since some popular websites handle content negotiation poorly and break when that option is on. Netflix was one high-profile example, but they’ve fixed their site now. I explained why this happens in detail in the issue report, and I won’t be removing the option because of it, but at least disabling the addon will fix the issue (of course, just unchecking the option will fix it too). I’ve added a warning to the option as well, just in case. Honestly I don’t think most people should need to turn that on, which is why it’s off by default.

The last big change is sort of halfway between a feature and a bugfix – copying and pasting from JSONView’s output will produce valid JSON. This includes all the quotes that JSONView omits for readability, and doesn’t include the “+/-” symbols used for collapsing objects and arrays. Hopefully this makes it easier to copy and paste bits of JSON out of Firefox and into your code or data without having to rewrite it.

Please update JSONView (if it hasn’t updated automatically by now) or download it if you haven’t tried it yet, and check out the code on GitHub if you find any bugs or have a feature you want to see.