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- Alessandro Levi Montalcini
- C.so Re Umberto 10
- 10121 Torino
- Italy
- e-mail: alm@torino.alpcom.it
- ftp://ftp.alpcom.it/software/mac/LMontalcini
- ftp://ftp.alpcom.it/software/mac/LMontalcini/html/alm.html
-
-
- Icon Archiver File Size Statistics:
-
- The numbers shown are based on two icon collections;
- the color collection contains 650 color icons extracted
- from various utility programs, the black & white one
- contains 3495 b&w icons extracted from the InfoMac V CD.
-
- * Here's a quick review of the results:
-
- (The last column shows the amount of saved space
- when using a plain Icon Archiver archive.)
-
- ================================================================
- | icon | # of | actual | size on | StuffIt | Archiver| % |
- | type | icons | size | 128M HD | archive | archive |saved|
- ================================================================
- | color | 650 | 1370K | 2092K | 428K | 635K | 54 |
- ----------------------------------------------------------------
- | b&w | 3495 | 1943K | 6994K | 1011K | 561K | 72 |
- ================================================================
-
- * Custom Icons Folder:
-
- The icons are directly shown by the Finder,
- but opening and scrolling the window is very slow.
- Saving a large number of small files to disk makes the
- disk catalog grow (slowing down disk recovery programs)
- and wastes a lot of storage space on larger disks.
- No more than a few hundred icons can be stored in one
- folder, or the Finder stops working properly.
-
- - Color Collection:
- 650 files on disk
- 1370K actual size
- 1632K used on a floppy disk (block size = 512 bytes)
- 2092K used on a 128M hard disk (block size = 2048 bytes)
- 6184K used on a CD-ROM (block size = 9728 bytes)
-
- - Black & White Collection:
- 3495 files on disk
- 1943K actual size
- 3500K used on a floppy disk
- 6994K used on a 128M hard disk
- 33212K used on a CD-ROM <- 30 MEGABYTES WASTED!!!
-
- * Custom Icons Folder, compressed with StuffIt:
-
- The icons must be decompressed before they are visible
- (which can take a long while on slower machines),
- and then they have the same problems described above.
- Compressing a single folder containing too many icons gets
- slower and slower (even on a Power Mac) as the number of
- icons increases over a few hundred items.
-
- - Color Collection:
- 1 file on disk
- 428K actual size (about 31% of the original size)
-
- - Black & White Collection:
- 1 file on disk
- 1011K actual size (about 52% of the original size)
-
- * Icon Archiver File:
-
- The Archiver stores the icon data in a special compressed form
- that allows it to decompress each icon's image on the fly when
- needed; the archive opens very quickly even when it contains a
- very large number of icons, and all icons are immediately visible.
- Note that the compression method is more efficient than StuffIt on
- black & white icons, and nearly as efficient on color ones as well.
-
- - Color Collection:
- 1 file on disk
- 635K actual size (about 46% of the original size)
-
- - Black & White Collection:
- 1 file on disk
- 561K actual size (about 28% of the original size)
-
- * Icon Archiver File, compressed with StuffIt:
-
- The data format used by the Icon Archiver allows compression
- programs to further compress the database very efficiently.
- This is the best solution for long-term icon storage, although
- a plain Icon Archiver file opens more quickly and doesn't
- require any decompression (which makes it more suitable for
- storage on CD-ROM devices).
-
- - Color Collection:
- 1 file on disk
- 249K actual size (about 18% of the original size)
-
- - Black & White Collection:
- 1 file on disk
- 248K actual size (about 12% of the original size)
-