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A question came in the other day as to why we did not have Macs in our offices so we could see the problems Mac users have when designing graphics for our application. After I got past the initial, knee jerk reaction of because we are an application development company not a graphic arts company; I then decided the question has real merit and should be respond to.

Our ProFusion Ultra IS and associated products and add-in modules are web based applications designed to be platform independent. However, they are BROWSER dependent and that does cause some real problems depending on a user’s specific platform.

We test our application in the most commonly used browsers based on browser statistics. Currently the IE family is the popularity leader followed by the Firefox family. We also test on Safari, to the best of our ability, as this is the most popular browser for Mac users.

Since our applications are web based the user’s computer and operating system is usually not the real issue. The real issues come from what browser and what operating system they are using and how the two interact:

What version of the browser are you using?
Is it the most recent version? New browsers are being introduced all the time that fix previously known bugs. We cannot recommend strongly enough that you upgrade not to the newest pre-release version (known as Beta versions) but that you do upgrade to the latest release versions. We also recommend that you install more than one browser on your computer. If you are a Windows user, we recommend both Internet Explorer and FireFox – current versions. If you are a Mac user, both Safari and FireFox.

What version of your computer’s operating system are you using?
Operating systems are constantly being upgraded and newer versions introduced to fix issues with previous versions. Browser upgrades are usually FREE so not upgrading to the latest version is a bit of a mystery to me. However, operating system upgrades are usually not free. But even if you have not kept current in your upgrades from XP to Vista to Windows 7, you still should be making sure the latest updates and patches released by your operating system supplier are up-to-date. These releases are free and are designed to fix problems discovered after the operating systems have been released.

Is your current version of your browser compatible with the operating system you are using?
Assuming you have the latest versions of your operating system and the latest version of your favorite browsers, make sure that the versions you have upgraded to are right for your computer. Windows has both 32-bit versions and 64-bit versions of their operating systems and slight variations in IE8 versions for each. Running the wrong version for your system configuration can cause minor problems in how content may be rendered in your browser and cause major headaches when you do not get the results you expect.

However, none of these issues answers questions we occasionally get from Graphic artists or users who are familiar with PhotoShop, Illustrator, CorelDraw or other graphics packages. These questions usually involve image size, placement or cropping. Print graphic artists work with files that are CMYK (Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and BlacK) and have a resolutions of 300 dpi (dots per inch) or higher. And the graphic packages are designed for helping create images for print where sizes are uniform, i.e. measurements in inches. Frequently these application users create graphic images in 300 dpi, some standard size 4” x 6” and CMYK color formats and then upload these very large files to the web. Web graphics typically are best viewed at 72 dpi. Web graphics are discussed in terms of screen resolutions of pixels. If you have a high resolution image or photographic that you wish to optimize for the web, we have provided an image resizing and cropping tool on our website to help you resize your original image to a web-optimized image.

Many people do not understand the difference between crop and resize. Resize means to change the dimensions of an image. Either the width or height or both and being able to do so proportionally (keeping the same aspect ratio) or individually (changing the aspect ratio) of the image. Images that have been resized proportionally look the same only smaller or larger (though upscaling images can cause pixilation of the image). Images that have been resized using only one dimension will look squished or skewed for lack of a more technically descriptive term.

Cropping on the other hand, is selection of a smaller area of the original image and removing everything outside the cropped area. Cropping can be done in the same aspect ratio as the original or can be done to just capture a portion of the image and can be significantly different proportions from the original.

We have placed a Free Image Resizing tool from webresizer on our website at http://www.netsolutionsna.com/resizer to allow users easy access to resizing and cropping tools. This tool allows a user without any graphic arts training to resize, add a border, colorize, web-optimize and crop images.

Finally, let’s talk video. Mac users will swear (and I cannot disagree with them) that video is easier on a Mac, however most Macs record video in QuickTime format. This is not viewable without additional software on Windows computers. Windows users record in Windows Media format, which is not viewable on a native Mac without additional software. Both Apple and Microsoft provide these applications free of charge, but they do not always work flawlessly on all versions and with all applications. There are a number of free and fee based converters to convert QuickTime video and Windows Media Video to Flash, a more universally viewable format. And most of the web based video storage/players like YouTube, Viddler, and others will convert these files to a universally playable format. With the added benefit of being able to place links in your website or blog posts that will “call” the video from the uploaded location. This also provides an additional benefit of not using any of your webhosting server resources to display the video – also known as using bandwidth and/or disc space, as videos can be quite large in size.

In conclusion, when posting either images or video on your website keep one thing in mind. Chances are good that at least some of your site visitors will not be using the same browser and operating systems you are. You need to plan on placing images that all users will be able to view regardless of what systems they are using. Be mindful that not all site visitors will have high speed Internet access. Not all site visitors will have the same screen resolutions you have on your computer and their view may differ slightly from your view. And finally, be aware that more and more users are viewing your website, images and videos on their mobile devices like Netbooks and mobile phones where it can be even more important to ensure that the images and videos have been optimized for maximum viewability.