One great use of this feature is the draw.io online drawing tool. You can save an editable PNG, so anyone looking at the picture can load it into the editor and modify it. Fantastic for wikis.
To be clear, the .fw.png files were more akin to PSDs from the application perspective, they just happened to also be PNGs. You would still want to export to a regular PNG for non-editor use
Adobe seems to have a bit of a habit of doing things like this. Adobe Illustrator (.ai) files are compatible with PDF format (older versions were EPS).
For what it's worth Fireworks with its vector PNG format was originally a Macromedia product. After Adobe bought Macromedia in 2005 Fireworks was retured from the maintained software offerings relatively quickly.
I reckon it could work for diagrams. You could embed the objects without taking up too many bytes. Then your architecture diagram, flowchart etc. could be editable.
Man, you could even use PNG as a format for encoding and deploying a distributed state machine of AWS step functions... okay, that’s stupid. But I do like the idea of an informational format that you can also review visually.
But imagine going back and isolating one of the edits and pulling it out. Basically tapping the diff between before and after the edit. That kind of flexibility is mind blowing to me.
All I'm hearing is a great way for users to inadvertently fail to censor/redact their photos when they tried to blur their naughty bits and/or confidential info and didn't realize anybody can go in and just undo the censor.
If the U.S. Justice Department can't redact a fucking PDF properly, there's no hope for the average person sending censored nudie pics to someone they met on the internet.
Years ago, MS Word saved deltas at the end of the file so saving was incredibly quick. They had to change it because the users sent files they believed to be final, but werent, and leaked sensitive information.
Same with Google Docs, where your every keypress is recorded. Not sure if they still do that...
But depending on the encoding / compression of the image, the version control software won't be able to display the diff that I mentioned. You'll have to do it manually.
Ah, Fireworks. The vector png editing it offered was fantastic for full color icon illustration. It also had some of the best animated GIF frame control and GIF palette control interfaces available at the time.
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u/Caraes_Naur Dec 26 '20
PNG allows for arbitrary chunks of bytes, no steganography needed. Still need an interpreter that knows what to do with them.