• Full color support.

• Full alpha channel support. (In modern browsers above Internet Explorer 6)

• Efficient lossless compression. (And by the end of this article, smaller than an equivalent GIF!)

• Patent free and open source.

However, in practice one will notice that some web browsers have mixed support for certain features found in the PNG format (usually PNG’s built-in gamma and color correction aka color profiles. Which can inadvertently cause serious differences in shade and color when viewing the same PNG image on different browsers). These inconsistencies cause a huge headache for web designers who wish to use this format for images in their designs!

That said, in this article I will show you how to solve this issue so that your PNG images display flawlessly on all modern browsers! This method also has the welcome side effect of shrinking the PNG file size, making them smaller than an equivalent GIF, and sometimes even comparable to the size of a lossy JPEG!

This process of “PNG Optimization” is extremely easy when one has the right tools. Luckily enough, Windows, Mac and Linux users have a fantastic open source utility called pngcrush. Since it’s a command line tool, you can optimize a virtually limitless number of .png’s with a single command! Perfect for processing the “/image” directory of a website.

pngcrush -rem alla -d outputdir *.png

For those wondering, “-rem alla” stands for “remove all ancillary chunks”.

This command strips out all ICC color profiles, gamma profiles, and other unnecessary auxiliary data that is generally used in photography, but not needed in website design; effectively solving consistency problems between browsers. In addition, this extra data can use up a lot of space in the PNG image, and once it’s stripped out the size of the PNG will generally shrink down significantly.

For Windows users, I’ve created a simple batch file that will run this command for you with a click of the mouse. Just remember to place the batch file, pngcrush.exe and the images to be optimized in the same directory before running it.

You can download the batch file, including the Windows excecutable of pngcrush from me directly, or get the latest version of pngcrush at Sourceforge.net

Enjoy! And I hope to see more usage of this great image format on the web.

Additional Resources:

TweakPNG – A utility for exploring the internals of a PNG file. For anyone who wants to see exactly what is inside of their PNG files. (http://entropymine.com/jason/tweakpng/)

Microsoft has literally modified Firefox without our knowledge or permission with the effect of adding a significant back door for malicious software creators.

Now the whole reason I use Firefox is because I do not want websites to have the ability to easily and quietly install software that could potentially mess up or take over my system. As mentioned in my previous post, this is the primary reason why I left Internet Explorer in the first place.

I personally think this is absolutely appalling and sheds even more light on Microsoft’s disgusting, anti-competitive business practices. These are the kinds of issues that the European Union have been fighting Microsoft about over the past few years, and continue to fight them about.

If your version of Windows is current, you’ll notice the new addition in Firefox under Tools, Add-Ons, Extensions.

Making matters worse, the uninstallation process is far from simple. Microsoft has also disabled the uninstall button in Firefox, and the removal process is a painstaking set of instructions found on Microsoft’s support website.

The issue was first discovered by the Washington Post’s Computer Security columnist, Brian Krebs, in an article entitled “Microsoft Update Quietly Installs Firefox Extension“. I personally first heard the issue through Steve Gibson’s and Leo Laporte’s Security Now podcast, episode 199. Steve does a great job explaining the little details and has quite an in depth discussion with Leo on the subject. I recommend checking these resources out it out if you would like more details.

This is a huge triumph for not only website developers, but also open source software as a whole. Before the Mozilla Foundation came onto the scene and released Firefox, the world of web browsers was in a depressing state. I wouldn’t doubt the majority of people reading this blog remember the post-Netscape, pre-Firefox days. I was graduating from highschool at the time and remember this era clearly.

Microsoft enjoyed a functional monopoly on the web browser market with their own Internet Explorer 6. As a result of Microsoft’s monopoly, web standards were for the most part thrown out the window, introduction of closed-proprietary features and formats were common, computer infection rates were very high and spyware ran rampant. At this time I frequented computer gaming events (LAN Parties!) with a number of my buddies. I remember us sharing our experiences about how ourselves, our friends and family members were constantly infected with malicious software contracted through Microsoft’s web browser. It was common to do a complete re-install of ones operating system every few months in order to keep things running at an acceptable level.

Then out of nowhere, Firefox was released into the market. I admit, even I was a little skeptical to try it at first, yet I do remember that first day.. My good friend Andrew Almond insisted I try out this fantastic and fresh new browser, insisting a huge improvement over Microsoft’s offering; after which I did.

Installing Firefox was a breath of fresh air as my own computer infection problems nearly disappeared overnight! After about a month, the adoption of this new web browser exploded, and the thought of using Internet Explorer over Firefox became nearly laughable to us. The good word spread like wildfire.

Fast forward to now, Firefox is in its third iteration and better than ever. Microsoft has since had to clean up their act as a result, and there are now a number of very good web browsers on the market to choose from including Opera, Apple’s Safari and Google’s Chrome. Competition is great, and the Internet is generally a much safer place than it used to be.

Firefox is still my favored web browser, and of course, it holds a special place in my heart as it once symbolized a bright light in a dark era on the web, and continues to symbolize itself as a model open source project. Thank you, Firefox!

Firefox eating IE icon by Archangel-Daemon!

Michal Marcinkowski, the creator of the infamous popular online action shooter called Soldat, is a huge fan of programming to heavy metal music. Michal listens to metal bands such as Manowar, Amon Amarth and Moonspell. He compares listening to metal as absorbing pure energy, using that energy in his programming efforts.

On the other hand, Dan “Data” Tabar, the main guy behind Data Realms, tends to listen to softer music such as chiptunes (including demo scene music) and retro video game music while programming his game, Cortex Command.

Personally, and surprisingly enough, I am partial to silence when programming. I’ve done some of my best programming and deepest thinking with a pair of earplugs. Although I do admit, some music is great to keep the thought process flowing; and in this case, my musical choice varies depending on what I’m working on. If the ideas I am translating into code are fairly complex, I will listen to something non-lyrical. This includes classical music such as Beethoven or Mozart, electronica, or similar to Dan, even tunes from retro video games.

Here are some sites that stream music I enjoy programming to:

http://www.kohina.com/ – Old school game and demo scene music.
http://www.di.fm/ – Electronica, classical and much more.
http://www.micromusic.net/ – Low tech music for high tech people!
http://www.scenemusic.eu/ – Demo scene music.
http://www.shoutcast.com/ – Good for everything else you can think of.

What do you listen to while you code? Feel free to share your musical recommendations and add your thoughts below!

After a few minutes of research, we found that Creative does not supply any type of MacOS X download for their Zen MP3 players. Fortunately, the opensource community has their own solution to this: XNJB.

XNJB is a downloadable Mac application that supports transfering of music, recharging, and general management of many types of MP3 players that generally are not supported on the Mac platform. XNJB makes use of the fantastic opensource libnjb and libmtp libraries to make support for these MP3 players possible on many unofficially supported platforms including: Linux, BSD, Solaris, and of course, MacOS X and Windows.

To use your Creative Zen player on MacOS X, go directly to the XNJB application download page and download the Binary. You can find out more about XNJB at the official XNJB website.

I formatted my workstation the other day and needed a way to transfer all of my Firefox bookmarks and settings. I stumbled upon a very simple and quick method through copying the Application Data folder. Interestingly enough, this method also has the welcome side-effect of transferring all of your add-ons as well; so things like DownThemAll and Firebug will all stay intact.

The folder you need to copy is: C:\Documents and Settings\USERNAME\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox (in my case C:\Documents and Settings\Nathan\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox).

The Application Data folder may be hidden on your system. To enable hidden system files do the following:

1. From the explorer window, go to the “Tools” menu.
2. Select “Folder Options…”
3. Select the “View” tab.
4. In the “Advanced Settings” area, enable “Show hidden files and folders”.
5. Hit the Ok button.

The previously hidden Application Data folder should now be accessible.

Once you have this folder backed up, you can paste it into a Firefox Application Data folder on another system and have your entire user profile and customizations fully restored.

Note: This method has only been tested with Firefox 3 under Windows XP.

His brand new blog over at javadocs.wordpress.com is fantastic; it details his work on many interesting and geeky subjects, including but not limited to: Robots, Linux, Artificial Intelligence and of course, Java. I wouldn’t be surprised to see Josh complete a skynet equivalent in the future (..without the apocalyptic tendencies, of course).

Speaking of Java; Josh is quite obsessive about Java. As a computer language guy myself, I find this to be a good thing (what can I say, Java is awesome). Josh uses Java for many of his projects, one of which included solving a complex tetris cube using the awesome power of distributed computing.

The distributed computing project was born one evening after Josh and his roommate purchased one of the tetris cubes and attempted to solve it by hand. The tetris cube puzzle itself is quite complex; before you even crack open the package, it challenges you with a slogan like “9,839 solutions, we dare you to find one!”.

After many days of trying to solve the cube, Josh became inspired to build a distributed computing system to help. He went on to build a solving client, and a central server (which worked with the clients, collecting stats and managing workloads). Running these clients on any processing power he could spare, he also enlisted the help of a number of his willing colleagues, myself included.

Leveraging my new dual-core, I joined “the collective” (as Josh liked to call it). A number of days, and a few billion iterations later, the group of about a dozen computers, using Josh’s software, solved the tetris cube. Interestingly enough, it was my own AMD Athlon 64 X2 5000+ (absolutely shameless plug for AMD) which ended up finding the first solution to the puzzle. It was certainly a fun project to be involved with.

Congratulations to Josh on his new blog; I find it excellent how our humble network of geek blogs is gaining more momentum every day.

Unfortunately, Dina does have one big pitfall. It’s only available in the bitmap based .fon format, which is notorious for bad portability. Incompatible on anything but Windows, and even some Windows applications will not read this format (Sun’s Java Netbeans IDE for example does not support it).

After a long day of various hacks and adjustments, I was able to convert the Dina font to a working TTF format. You can now benefit from the fruits of my labor using the link below:

Dina truetype font pack

Here is a preview for your viewing pleasure:

For those interested, this is a screenshot from the Netbeans IDE. I have been recently giving Netbeans and Eclipse a test drive in preparation for my upcoming developments in Java.

#  Anon-O-Mus  Says:
April 5th, 2008 at 7:15 pm

You should make an entirely open-source game.

Where you make a basic shell, and the community has X weeks to do whatever the hell they want to it before it gets shutdown and released as a final game. Not only would it be fun, but the end product would probably be hilarious.

I know i’m not the only one out there who would like to see this attempted.

First I’d like to give a shout out to my colleague and longtime friend Dryw Paulic and his new blog over at Port-0.com. I think it’s great how our humble network of geek blogs is growing.

Over the past few days I’ve been slowly returning to my roots as an active game developer. This move was triggered by a Flash game project I was contracted to work on recently.

I’ve always found the world of game development as fascinating. The field attracts many different kinds of people, including a wide variety of creative and innovative types.

One of my favorite people in the game industry is John Carmack. For those who do not know him, he is the founder of id Software and inventor of one of the greatest game series known to man: Quake. He shares many of my own design philosophies, such as elegance in simplicity and ease of understanding. One perfect example of this is his Quake III networking model (a must-read for anyone designing or currently producing a realtime networked game).

Earlier this week I was watching a number of Carmack’s keynotes on Google Video. This man is passionate about what he does and has a lot of great ideas. For the most part, I find his presentations and writing very applicable and entertaining from a game developer point of view; I wholeheartedly recommend checking them out if you are seasoned or aspiring game developer.

Here’s a clip from his QuakeCon 2006 Keynote:

Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5