Well... not quite "news" as such but I figured I'd post it as a news topic in order to put it on the front page of PhazePages; I'm sure more people will see it this way.
So anyway, I'm sort of fond of Skype 5.5's emoticons and desired to use them outside of the context of Skype since I explode a lot when people use terrible puns around me. Unfortunately, I found myself rather explosion-less... a dud, if you will
Internet searches to that effect only provided me with requests that someone provide Skype v5 emotes, or I found Skype v4 emotes instead, which... are kind of bad in comparison. Sometimes you just need to do these things yourself, and I did! A bit of research here, a bit of cursing Microsoft's name for their unintuitive Batch scripting system there... and I did!
I had absolutely no luck when it came to attempting to extract the source images from the Windows version of Skype 5.5, but it turns out that unlike Linux, Macs actually have a version of Skype that isn't a completely outdated piece of detritus. It also has a neat bonus in that the program already has a handy loose setup of files when installed - though I didn't install it. Fairly sure I used 7zip to unpack it.
It's as simple as a drag and drop of the "x_anim.png" files onto the bat file. However, there are some requirements for this bat file to work if you intend to actually use it: and . In all likelihood you shall also need to change the path pointing to APNGasm on your PC too because your login probably isn't "Phaze"...
Disclaimer since it doesn't hurt to be safe in this world: All these are Skype's emotes, not mine, I just converted them into APNG (and if you want MNG you almost assuredly can do it yourself. I think it's a bad format).
Oh, and there is a small caveat: APNG support is not universal. . I would've used GIF, but GIF is also a bad (read: outdated) format. It doesn't have 8-bit transparency which can be a problem. If you want GIF emoticons there's probably a handy no-brainer tool to do it for you.
Anyway, Phaze out. Self-destruct activated