Re:Google needed foreign techies to figure out that less col...
by neilk on Monday April 13, 2009 @12:08PM
(#559936)
It seems really strange.
But, sometimes Google engineers have huge blind spots. Often they are just general purpose smart engineering students. I've met plenty who couldn't deal with piping on the command line. It's barely plausible that nobody on the team even knew there were GIFs with smaller look-up tables, or the overhead involved in dithering or making smoother transitions.
Come to think of it, I bet this is what really happened: they were reusing map tiles from Maps and didn't even consider making their own. So, maybe this guy built a whole new tile generation pipeline for mobile, or figured out some way to remap colors from existing tiles into a smaller look-up table without sacrificing too much quality. That could be legitimately heroic.
But, sometimes Google engineers have huge blind spots. Often they are just general purpose smart engineering students. I've met plenty who couldn't deal with piping on the command line. It's barely plausible that nobody on the team even knew there were GIFs with smaller look-up tables, or the overhead involved in dithering or making smoother transitions.
Come to think of it, I bet this is what really happened: they were reusing map tiles from Maps and didn't even consider making their own. So, maybe this guy built a whole new tile generation pipeline for mobile, or figured out some way to remap colors from existing tiles into a smaller look-up table without sacrificing too much quality. That could be legitimately heroic.