- Feature Articles
- CodeSOD
- Error'd
-
Forums
-
Other Articles
- Random Article
- Alex's Soapbox
- Announcements
- Best of…
- Best of Email
- Best of the Sidebar
- Bring Your Own Code
- Coded Smorgasbord
- Mandatory Fun Day
- Off Topic
- Representative Line
- News Roundup
- Editor's Soapbox
- Software on the Rocks
- Souvenir Potpourri
- Sponsor Post
- Tales from the Interview
- The Daily WTF: Live
- Virtudyne
Admin
What do you mean with "more standard"? All relevant graphical browsers support PNG - IE, Firefox, Seamonkey (formerly known as Mozilla), Opera, Safari, Konqueror...
Lynx does not support it, but it doesn't support JPEG either.
And yes, IE has some problems with advanced PNG features like the alpha channel. But these aren't relevant for plain old GUI screenshots, are they?
And the benefit is not getting uGLy ARtIfaCTs beCAuSe oF lOsSY cOMPreSSiON, and still obtaining small files. If you don't see how ugly the text in this particular screenshot is, I congratulate you for having worse eyes than I.
Funny, the few times I actually noticed that PNGs were used (mostly because I saved the image to disk), they always seemed to be compressed. GIMP compresses PNGs (yes, you can set the compression level to 0, but you don't want to) and even MS Paint, although the compression is somewhat inferior to that of GIMP. What you are describing seems to be PEBKAC like PNG used for the wrong purpose like storing photographs where JPEG would actually be better.
Admin
the real wtf is that no one's realized this isn't about syncing, it's about tz definitions--western australia added daylight saving time.
Admin
Obviously New Zealand isn't going to set the clocks back by 23 hours instead of forward by 1 hour, but it would have made a lot more sense if they'd just used GMT -12 in the first place.
Of course, Kiritimati now shows GMT +14. That's pretty screwed up. I thought it used to be +10.
I'm dealing with time zones now and I've given up on any rational assumptions at this point, allowing anything up to 24 hours (it would be really, really weird if there were two time zones offset by more than two days...)
Admin
It's due to the super high-res sattelite imagery map from which you select your approximate location. Pretty pixels. Or maybe it is just an installer bug, which is what I'd really bet on.
Admin
IE does not fully support PNGs. It is not capable of displaying 24 bit PNGs with transparency. It can only display 8 bit PNGs with transparency, which kind of defeats the purpose, you might as well use a gif. This was supposed to be fixed in IE7 but unfortunately it has not, IE still cannot display 24 bit (or higher) PNGs with transparency properly, the transparency is lost. So to have a transparent PNG appear the same in FF and IE, one must carefully stepwise posterise the image before saving it in 8 bit png format, which usually results in significant loss of color and nasty aliasing.
I know, jpegs do not support transparency at all, and so this is a little off topic, but I think that IE's lack of full support for PNGs explains why they aren't used very much. The only way currently to get good transparency in IE is to use a directx image loader transform, which of course is IE only. Perhaps someday IE might adhere to the css opacity tag standard.
It is really a shame as some dramatic effects can be efficiently achieved with transparent PNGs.
Admin
Admin
Sigh. I submitted a comment immediately after this article was posted, but it hasn't shown up yet. I figure it was a time zone sync issue, so I've just now finished installing the 4GB update. Let's see if this one shows up.
Admin
In trouble for laughing in the workplace? Wow.
Admin
Since the overlords know that nothing I'm working on could be funny, the laugh gives away my browsing habits.
Admin
According to this
A guide to PNG optimization http://www.cs.toronto.edu/~cosmin/pngtech/optipng.html
Admin
Plain utterly wrong. View this page in IE7: http://entropymine.com/jason/testbed/pngtrans/ Works perfectly.
Admin
You'd be amazed the weird stuff that happens with certain MS products. Exchange (at least up to 2003) uses a signed int for it's mailbox quota, which it measures in bytes! At least it has the good grace to throw a warning if you try to set it above 2GB, unlike SharePoint which quite cheerfully wraps around without so much as a "by your leave", giving you a negative maximum uploaded file size.
Not one bit funny...
Admin
Err, that IE has some problems with alpha channels (IOW: 8-bit transparency information) is pretty much what I was saying about IE, too. The gist being that it doesn't matter for screenshots.
Support for PNGs with alpha channel has been greatly improved in IE7, but there are still some issues. Compare this page in Firefox and IE7. IIRC the slight discoloration is due to incorrect blending of RGB values when several PNGs with alpha channel are stacked.
Admin
I think you're thinking of Americans there. You know, more bombs than everyone else, more money, more wasteland, more people, more idiots, etc.
Admin
I believe Paul Hogan would beg to differ, mate
Admin
Admin
Wow. A bug in IE caused by MS reinventing the wheel and trying to deform a standard to match their own sloppy coding. Pity they didn't just use the libpng reference code and be done with it.
Funny how people argue against using a particular OPEN format by saying a known broken product doesn't support it. Why don't we stop using JPEG because IE2 has some bugs with them?
Admin
One time I was having some issues with a drawing function. It was off by a pixel. So I took a screen snapshot, and sent out to a rather large internal alias two .pngs. For some reason Outlook decided to send these two (rather small) files in a 2M email.
Some moron on the alias emails me back. Tells me in the future not to send such large files to a large alias, to send them as JPGs next time!
Lets ignore the fact that the same files in JPG would have been twice as large as the PNGs BUT he was suggesting that I sent pics in a lossy format when I was talking about pixels!
Admin
Ah, JPEG FUD.
Screenshots are uncompressable. There is nothing you can do with screenshots to reduce them. Those days have died out.
JPEG is the standard format to use, but lots of you are noticing the artefacts -- sharp edges become fuzzy and get surrounded by speckling, and bright coloured text becomes muted. Even after disabling chroma subsampling, you still have to ramp the quality right up to get around this.
JPEG is intended solely for continuous tone images, i.e. photos. Some GUIs, especially Mac OS X, are dominated by continous tones. Many others are not, especially the "classic" Windows UI (pre-XP, and XP and Vista in classic mode).
PNG is good for images with large areas of flat colour. Except that most people run their GUI in 24-bit colour or more. Title bar gradients, and 24- or 32-bit icons. So you have to use PNG in 24-bit mode. Yes, it works perfectly in IE. No, you won't get small files. PNG isn't that great in 24-bit colour.
Your options are large files or large files.
Decrease the colour depth to 8-bit, and PNG behaves. Many screenshots do reduce well to 8-bit, although you'll have to dither the title bar gradient in Windows and many applications suck rocks at dithering. When you start including lots of colourful icons, nothing short of Photoshop 7 (or Jen Elaan's pv) will ever give you a good reduced palette. All other apps will make the image look pretty much as horrible as JPEG did. Worse, PNG and GIF both struggle horribly with discontinuous tones such as photos and dithering. pv and Photoshop 7 can do pretty impressive reduced palette construction, but the resulting image is so dithered that the file won't compress.
What happens if the screenshot is of a mostly flat tone GUI like Windows 2000, but there's a JPEG wallpaper in the background? JPEG will artefact up your image, PNG will crap itself trying to compress discontinuous tones ...
I get the feeling that the only solution is a special image format where the image is divided up into arbitrary-sized zones, where each zone is compressed either with JPEG, RLE, GIF or PNG depending on the nature of that zone.
Personally, for awkward images, I try PNG and JPEG to find the best match, artefacts and dithering vs file size. Sadly, the spectacular clarity of LCDs means that artefacts that I thought were not showing up (on my CRT) are much more visible.
If you and your readers have bandwidth to spare, go for 24-bit PNG. If you use a lot of screenshots (e.g. the old pop-up potpourri, may it rest in peace), all your dial-up readers will now hate you and declare jihads on you.
Admin
It IS a one line Perl program plus all the Micro$uck cruft that passes for the run-time environment which is required to interpret that one line program and make it work with Vista.EWW
Admin
Western Australia has two time zones, there's a small area near the South Australia border that is 1 hr 15 minutes in front of the normal WA time
Admin
Returning briefly to the article... I actually submitted a link to this this site years back with this crap problem.
Basically it's a piece of phenomonally bad design by Microsoft: http://blogs.msdn.com/oldnewthing/archive/2004/07/09/178342.aspx
Of course, there's a disclaimer he's added stating that this is only done when the program doesn't provide the information - but of course it COULD cache it for next time at least... There's no escaping from the crapness of this.
Admin
You need this: http://wistinga.online.fr/safarp/
Ah, those precious seconds and patience you save.
Admin
4800MB? Not even close. DVDs are subject to the same capacity rip-off that hard drives are, thus your '4.7GB' DVD is 4,700,000,000 Bytes = 4482MB.
Don't even get me started on how much I hate the term 'MiB'. One Megabyte is 1048576 Bytes. Always has been, always will be.
Admin
This is entirely reasonable. Western Australia is so far from anywhere that it actually takes longer to orbit the Sun. As they have a different length year to everyone else they have to implement some pretty complicated rules to keep in synch with everywhere else. This is why they have three extra hours in a day - 'ugh', 'ugh ugh' and 'ugh ugh ugh'.
Admin
Admin
Um. That's a .Net ClickOnce application for sure. For some strange reason, all the applications that are published thru ClickOnce show up this big.
Admin
While Western Australia is notable in it's regard from being miles from everwhere, it is not unique in its position. Mt Everest as well has its own time zone, permanetly stuck in the middle of winter.
Less far afield the A.C.T. has an even crazier time zone. It actually takes three years before it sinks up with the rest of the continent, let alone the world.
Didjabringyabeeralong is also noteable for its timezone.
Admin
Maybe it contains all recent the WTF articles of dubious merit - then again I could write a text generator that emulates the predictable writing style in less an 50K
Admin
Tacos are awesome!
captcha: Atari - also awesome!
Admin
Yes, I stand corrected. I agree about MiB and KiB and all of that garbage; I find the whole idea idiotic. However, my point still stands: 4095 MB will fit on a single DVD.
Admin
An American, a Canadian, and an Australian were sitting in a seedy bar enjoying a few beers.
The American grabbed his beer, knocked it back in one gulp, threw the glass into the air, and shot it with his handgun. As he set the handgun on the bar, he told the Canadian and the Australian that in the great U.S. of A, they had so much money they never drank out of the same glass twice.
Next the Australian drank his beer, threw the glass into the air, and shot the glass with the American's gun. As he was setting the gun back on the bar he proclaimed that in Australia they had so much sand that glass was cheap and he too never drank out of the same glass twice.
Next the Canadian drank his beer, grabbed the gun off the bar, and shot the American. As he was setting the gun back on the bar, he told the Australian that in Canada we have so many Americans you never have to drink with the same one twice.
Admin
QFT
Admin
Dear Mr. Beardsmore,
to try this out, I took a full screenshot (1600x1200@24) of my browser window and some application windows in the background using GIMP and saved it two times, once as an uncompressed BMP, and once as a PNG with compression level 9. In your honor, I named them moron.bmp and moron.png. Could you please explain why moron.bmp is 5626 kilobytes in size and moron.png is only 131 kilobytes if screenshots are incompressible?
Your talk about gradients in title bars is hilarious. 24-bit PNG can compress gradients, they just doesn't compress as well as a single-color background, of course. PNG is not GIF. Plus, the actual content pane, which is much larger, features mostly plain black on white text where PNG excels.
And if PNG is not suitable for taking screenshots on Mac OS X, could you please care to explain why Tiger saves screenshots as PNG? (Try it out with Shift-Command-3, for example.)
I just opened "Add or Remove Programs", scaled it to pretty much the same size as the screenshot to this article, took a shot of the window using GIMP and saved it as a maximum compression PNG. The result is a 30K file, as opposed to the 45K JPEG in the article. And, of course, at a much better picture quality.
Admin
Wow! Most cool. I must have buggered up my test of it. Perhaps I was using an IE7 beta when I tested it, or perhaps the version of Adobe ImageReady I was using to generate my PNGs is wacky somehow.
Though I do notice on that test page there is no alpha or palette transparency gradients in 24bit, which I think is what I had tested. I'll have to play with this some more and find out what IE7 likes.
Thanks for the link!
Admin
To add insult to injury, I converted the screenshot to 8-bit indexed (w/o dithering), again saved it as a PNG and the resulting file is only 13K, while still being of a much better quality than the JPEG (actually, I don't even see a difference between the 8-bit and the 24-bit PNG).
Admin
More standard? WTF?
Yeah, old versions of IE couldn't handle transparent PNGs without an ugly hack before IE 7, but screenshots don't use transparency, so even old versions of IE would work just fine to view it.
PNGs, unlike JPEGs, don't have ugly square artifacts that blur text (or any other boundaries where the color changes sharply). BMPs are uncompressed, and GIFs, well, they're limited to 256 colors and I don't think the desktop was in 256 color mode in that screenshot, so no.
In other words, the real benefit of using a PNG is that this whole silly thread wouldn't exist.
Admin
Still smaller than Vista.
...seriously, it's actually the code required to bend space-time around the computer by one hour. I'm impressed they fit it in such small space, to be honest.
Admin
Yeah, but did your Add/Remove Programs screen include a 4GB file? Yeah, I didn't think so! You should be amazed that JPG compressed that all the way down to just 15k larger than your much smaller ARP window!
Admin
Huh? I mean WTF!!?? Maybe if you're talking about a screen shot of an image, or of one of those silly-ass gradient window decorations that M$ has been pushing [the first thing most power users get rid of, by reverting to Classic views]. Most UIs still use a liited number of colors, have large expanses of single colors, and have repeating patterns. Therefore good grapics software can still reproduce perfectly with LZW compression. It does require a bit of pre-scanning to assemble the palette of colors, but since GIF color tables can hold up to 256 24-bit colors, they can encode the vast majority of screen shots of normal UI features.
I'm no fan of PNG, really. It strikes me as more trendy than practical. But to say that screenshots are uncompressable is just plain stupid.
Admin
GIFs are limited to 256 colors, yes. That is 256 24-bit colors. I don't see anywhere near 256 colors in the screenshot you refer to, so GIF would handle and compress it just fine. There is a big difference between number of colors and color mode. Particularly when discussion screenshots.
Admin
Admin
Actually, Western Australia is BIGGER than Texas
Admin
Western Australia has a large number of monolithic termite mounds, which line up with true north, and can be used for telling the time. The fix actually contains scent trails for all termites in the state, instructing them to rotate their mounds so as to tell the correct time.
Admin
.gif for line art (and most screen captures) and .jpg for photos. Dithering is better than edge artifacts.
Admin
Admin
Western Australia doesn't officially have daylight savings time - we're currently trialling it. In my life time we've had at least two referendums on the subject and it's been rejected each time. The reasons were various complaints such as: my cows won't know when to give milk, my curtains will fade, my carpets will fade, I can't get my kids to sleep, I'm getting fat 'cos I'm partying too much, ...
So why is the installer so large? That's easy. On installation it asks the user whether they agree or disagree with each of the complaints raised in the referendums. It then sets the timezone to your personal preferences. If you think that daylight savings is the cause of your carpets fading, it does nothing, but if you disagree with all the complaints it sets the timezone to the correct time.
Admin
W. Australia: 2,532,400 square kilometres
;)
Admin
Admin
My spoon is too big.