For busy adult website designers and developers, every little bit counts: every little bit of quality, every little bit of performance and every little bit of time spent on a project.
A product of the CSS Hat team, Enigma64 (www.getenigma64.com) provides its users with “the fastest way to get images from Photoshop,” using Base64 encoding to greatly streamline website loading.
Enigma64 offers one click image exports from Photoshop, with a solution that saves a minute on each optimized and exported file.
According to the company’s David Siska, Enigma64 offers one click image exports from Photoshop, with a solution that saves a minute on each optimized and exported file.
“With just a single click you get cropped, trimmed, transparent and highly optimized PNG8 or PNG24 and JPG images,” Siska told XBIZ. “You can also easily obtain Base64 code which is great for emails, icons or thumbnail images.”
A term originating from a specific type of MIME content transfer encoding, Base64 is a group of similar binary-to-text encoding schemes representing binary data via an ASCII string that has been translated into a radix-64 representation.
“Base64 encoding schemes are commonly used when there is a need to encode binary data that needs to be stored and transferred over media that are designed to deal with textual data,” Wikipedia explains. “This is to ensure that the data remain intact without modification during transport.”
The online encyclopedia goes on to note that Base64 is commonly used in a number of applications including email via MIME, storing complex data in XML, or including images within scripts to avoid reliance on external files. Base64’s use as a tool by illicit spammers seeking to circumnavigate antispam measures is also noted by Wikipedia, since many spam filters do not interpret this type of material.
Siska says that one good example of the power of Base64 for web design is when a page features many thumbnail images or even full-size photos.
“You would have too many requests to the server and the photos might have a bigger size when you use image files rather than Base64 code,” Siska says, adding, “Pages often load much faster when using Base64 coding.”
Enigma64 is easy to operate. Simply select your desired Photoshop layer(s) and either export the image file with lossless image optimization, saving up to 80 percent of the size — or use the friendly interface to enable the easiest way to encode images to Base64, via this workflow boosting tool.
Users will always have the latest update of Enigma64 at hand, since when there is an update it can be downloaded directly from within the plugin by clicking on its update bar. The original download link that the customer uses can also be re-accessed, and is always updated when new Enigma64 versions are released.
Enigma64 is now available for $14.99 with a full moneyback guarantee and supports Photoshop CS5 and CS6 on Mac OS X 10.6 or above, along with Windows XP or above. Special deals are available on multiple license purchases.
If you are looking to live on the leading edge of web design Enigma64 and its Base64 tools will help get you there and keep you there. Give it a try and see for yourself.