Instead, you need to add it by installing the “Android SDK Platform-tools” package via the Android SDK Manager.

Once you’ve done this, it will be available under {path to Android}/android-sdk/platform-tools/ instead of its old location under android-sdk/tools/

Simple!

The colours below are the palette generated with indexed transparency (left) vs. true alpha transparency (right) in a 256 colour 8 bit PNG by a lovely piece of software called Fireworks. Let me explain.

I’ve joined a new UI development team this past week that require pretty broad-based browser support for a bunch of sites (i.e. IE6 experience needs to not suck) and their process includes a PNG quantization step before hitting a live environment. This is cool, but the IE6 support necessitates not using alpha. Or so I’m told.

This prompted me to look up something that I discovered probably around a year ago but never got around to writing it up, nor particularly practicing!

I can’t remember where, exactly, though suspect Dave Shea might’ve had a pointer or an article that presumed knowledge of the technique. In the process of writing this article, I’ve also rediscovered a SitePoint article on the issue that’s quite helpful.

The bottom line is PNG-24 is great but impractical in older browsers for a host of reasons. While 8 bit PNG is not without its limitations (c’mon, 256 colours ought to be enough for anyone!), it’s clear that for graceful degradation and marginal improvements in file size it’s stil worth considering.

In terms of creating images there are a few challenges. First and foremost, everyone uses Photoshop but Photoshop sucks at save-for-web’ing 8 bit PNGs: you just don’t get the options you need. Fireworks hands you this in spades. I’m no Fireworks pro insofar as workflows and just getting designs done goes, so typically I’ll save for web to a 24bit PNG from Photoshop and then open that in Fireworks to export the alpha 8 bit image.

The Sitepoint article linked above suggests that [some] quantizers will give you the chance to do the same thing, but the issue is if you’re exporting an 8 bit PNG in the first place you’ve already lost the chance to create an image with alpha. Most front end devs will want to preview things like dithers, colour banding, etc., so handing control over to a CLI tool just isn’t going to fly. I’d contend that Fireworks is really the only viable solution in that it balances image optimisation and control. Of course, you’re welcome to run the PNG Fireworks outputs through a quantiser: it’s already 8 bit so your palette is locked in, and the quantiser is unlikely to mess with the alpha if it purports to support this.

The reasons are broader than just browser support: in my (limited) testing, PNG24 files could easily weigh in at twice the size of their RGBA 8 bit alternatives. On a 500x500px test that generated the paletts shown above, file sizes were as follows:

• 8 bit PNG indexed: 7KB
• 8 bit PNG transparency: 7.5KB
• 24 bit PNG: 15KB

I’m going to make sure I actually take advantage of this feature in the future, as there are clear filesize benefits to be had as well as support for crappy, dwindling browsers. Sorry, IE6.

The easiest way to resolve this is to take the file through Compressor first — ProRes 422 Progressive will be great. Frustrating, but whatever.

Think of this as an (il)logic puzzle. Want to renew? Go get a green slip. Got a greenslip? Go get another safety check. Want to just give us money and do the others out of order? Nope, sorry, you can’t do that.

N/A in the Safety Check column actually means “you’re covered for now, don’t sweat it” — but you wouldn’t know it from the form. There’s a vicious red X if you’re not covered, but nary a tick if you are. Also, what’s with the grotesquely antialiased “i” rollovers?

If you’ve registered a company in Australia, chances are you’ve already got a DUNS number. Surprising, huh?

Search for your business and a DUNS number will be available top left, just above the company name or ABN.

I discovered this while trying to register for Apple’s iOS Enterprise program, which requires a DUNS number as part of the application process. You can sign up for the developer program without one (and it’s cheaper), but to privately manage and distribute apps you need enterprise access.

As we prepare to launch our Equip Mobile program into schools, the ability to roll out software to all users in an organisation is something we need to be across!

When you suspend/sleep a computer, often when you resume MAMP has lost track of the MySQL instance it started and can no longer connect to it. Not sure if this is a problem with the MySQL build being used, but as the problem has existed since 2009, I don’t have high hopes for it being fixed anytime soon.

The quickest solution is to kill off the process it had started previously and then hit “Start Servers” again — it just takes one line on the terminal.

killall -9 mysqld

Be aware that this will kill all running MySQL processes (including those outside of MAMP’s control) — this is normally fine, as no-one actually hosts websites on OS X!

Instead, use their form to send the government the OPPOSITE message!

Here’s what I said (more or less editing their message to the reverse effect):

“I am writing to say that I WHOLEHEARTEDLY SUPPORT the Government’s plan to introduce a licence to punt.

Problem gambling is an area of concern for the community and needs to be addressed by government.

A licence to punt on the pokies MAY drive problem gamblers to other forms of gambling, including online — where possible, it is, of course, important that these too are regulated appropriately — through funding community level support for problem gamblers, as well as domestic regulation (not Internet filtering). The clubs and pubs will be impacted by this legislation, of course, but the net benefit to the community stands to be tremendous.

Gambling destroys many families and imposes significant pressures on the financial security and emotional stability of individuals: within reason, this trumps the “privacy, rights and the importance of local clubs and pubs” that ClubsAustralia and the AHA so desire you to consider.”

There are other ways to contact your MPs, of course, but there’s something deeply satisfying about using tools provided by some of the largest industry lobbying groups in the country against their own purposes.

If you’re on one of those special midget keyboards (a laptop?) that lacks useful buttons like Home and End, you’re probably looking for Shift + Fn + Left / Shift + Fn + Right.

There are a bunch of ways you can remap the key bindings, but in the interests of staying sane when working on others’ machines, it’s probably worth changing your muscle memory instead of your bindings here. It’s also worth noting that Vim users can use ^ / $ for beginning / end of line respectively.

If you’re setting up a new computer and have Authorized This Computer (Store -> Authorize This Computer) already, it seems weird that iTunes won’t let you just sync your apps from the device.

For whatever reason, you ALSO need to “Transfer Purchases from” the iPhone or iPod in question. Crazy huh? Nevertheless, it’s actually pretty straightforward.

The way it’s meant to happen!

As and when typically just means “right before you click on a link”, with the whole thing triggered by mouseovers. The first page Firefox loads when you start the browser is available here — http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/4.0/firstrun/ — can you see what’s wrong with it?

I love event-listenery JavaScript as much as the next guy, but the icon on Step 2 suggested I’d be going to another page (c’mon, that’s just what right angle quotation marks have been co-opted to mean on the web!) while the browser wouldn’t say where.

Before visiting any actual pages in Firefox, not much trusting it at this point, I did some quick Googling and discovered two things:

1. That you can bring back the status bar by simply typing ⌘ + / or Ctrl + /, and
2. That, not knowing this, people have created at least one browser extension to do exactly that.

Fail.

Of course, if I’d bothered to actually USE Firefox for 2 minutes–trusting it even though it wouldn’t tell me where links were pointing–I’d have discovered that ordinarily it does. Pie-faced, I retreated to blogging angrily about how Mozilla’s first run screen is a great HTML5 page but a horrible initial demo of the browser’s capabilities.

A few observations from this:

• Browsers need to tell you where you’re going next. Users don’t[/shouldn’t] trust the Internet enough to find out when they arrive.
• None of this would’ve happened had the team creating the landing page used progressive enhancement and unobtrusive JS technique.
• The team probably didn’t because they wanted to show off how well their amazing browser does fancy “HTML5” (in the Jobs-ian CSS/JS inclusive sense) stuff. Fine, but also link to a page that has the same content.
• Browser vendors are responsible for keeping user’s trust from the very start. This is a weird issue because it’s actually nothing to do with the browser’s functionality itself, but it temporarily impacted my opinion on how seriously Firefox take user choice/security/usability in a significant way.
• No-one actually uses Firefox anymore, so it doesn’t matter. It is a pain while using Firebug to test my own sites, though. ;-)

After spending a day and a bit last week hacking together a simple mailer (with merge capabilities) for Amazon’s Simple Email Service (it’s really pretty simple) it struck me that there must be a better way to do this. I toyed with launching a web app for others to use to simply accomplish the same thing, but figured someone, somewhere, must’ve already done something substantially similar.

Turns out they have. Perfect.

For us, SES was a great way to send once-off personal mail beyond the volume that our Apps for Domains accounts permit. The biggest downside was Amazon’s rate limiting — something that still applies for this app.

This app would’ve made the process a lot quicker, though I’m not sure of its value for regular list emailing — which seems to be how they’re marketing it. You’re not just paying to send emails with MailChimp/Campaign Monitor — you’re paying for deliverability and list management. AWS give you the deliverability side (at least, that was our experience) but do nothing to help you with unsubscribes, updates, and tracking.

That said, if I’d found this a week ago…

yiic webapp ..\testdrive

Unfortunately, for most users this will result in an error along the lines of “bash: ./yiic: Permission denied” unless you first make yiic executable.

The easiest way to do this is to run the following command in your framework directory:

chmod +x yiic

The x simply means “eXecutable”.

You can stuff around with AviSynth scripts, or you can give up and transcode using Handbrake or another 3rd party tool — or you can be clever about it and use a remuxing tool that’s much faster and better quality. SmartLabs have a freeware (not open source) product called tsMuxeR (edit: link reported broken in comments — mirror)that will do exactly this that worked like a charm on Windows 7, but there are also versions for Linux and OS X available.

Worth a shot if you’re stuck with a video file Premiere doesn’t want to know about.

The Aokigahara Forest is the most popular site for suicides in Japan. After the novel Kuroi Jukai was published, in which a young lover commits suicide in the forest, people started taking their own lives there at a rate of 50 to 100 deaths a year. The site holds so many bodies that the Yakuza pays homeless people to sneak into the forest and rob the corpses. The authorities sweep for bodies only on an annual basis, as the forest sits at the base of Mt. Fuji and is too dense to patrol more frequently

Japan has one of the world’s highest suicide rates, with societal expectations and the pressures of high density, high pace living often given as reasons. Park ranger and geologist, Azusa Hayano, serves as an impromptu counselor on his patrols of the region. “I was curious as to why people kill themselves in such a beautiful forest. I still haven’t found the answer to that.”

Japan really needs to hear the gospel — God’s revealed himself in creation, but as Romans 10:14 puts it, “how then will they call on him in whom they have not believed? And how are they to believe in him of whom they have never heard? And how are they to hear without someone preaching?” (ESV) Pray that the word of life goes out in Japan and many people are saved from suicide and also an eternity apart from God!

• Mission Japan
• Japan — The Joshua Project
• OMF Japan
• CMS Profile: Japan

Short version: Don’t do it, it’s a bad idea, host it yourself if you’re serious about business video online, host it on YouTube if you don’t yet have the resources to.

Vimeo is an amazing service. Their high quality, long format video is a great choice for people publishing creative content online, and the general awfulness of competitor YouTube’s embedding options (and lack of any premium plan) makes Vimeo’s sleek player embed look downright amazing.

The temptation for businesses, therefore, is to hijack it and just see what happens. More than a few people have written about Vimeo’s commercial use guidelines over the last little few months — and the consensus is, rightly, that Vimeo is not the right tool here.

In short, yes, Vimeo have hosted commercial videos, and yes, some of those videos are explicitly condoned by Vimeo. However, in terms of building traffic, community, and ensuring continuity, depending on Vimeo would be really, really ill advised. It’s not what the service is designed to do, you have absolutely no recourse (as either a paid or unpaid client) to any decision they may make to remove your content, and there are even lingering availability (network) issues with a number of Australian ISPs.

It’s a bad idea, despite the good encode quality and beautiful player skin. It’s irrelevant that others have used it commercially with success — the reality is that unless they’ve got a commercial arrangement with Vimeo (Threadless do, Samsung did, etc. — but once you’re pulling the kind of campaign traffic they can then Vimeo might come to an arrangement with you about it!) you’re at considerable risk of having your content pulled. In the scheme of things this should matter lots more than just finding somewhere else to put your content. Sites like Vimeo are compelling because of community, and they’ve done a lot of work to integrate with Facebook, etc., that YouTube haven’t yet, or won’t because of political (business) hurdles. SEO is also a consideration — you NEVER want duplicate content, because it devalues it when you end up competing with yourself. Yet when your content could be pulled at any moment (all it takes is a user to flag a video for moderation and the whole thing comes crashing down), having it hosted on another website starts to sound compelling. Vimeo is an amazing, community driven platform that is utterly disinterested in promoting commercial interests that don’t have amazing creative — and talking heads on a video don’t even for a moment fall into that box.

If you want to do video seriously (i.e. not on YouTube, where similar problems CAN arise RE: content moderation but are much more rare in practice), then hosting your own on a content distribution network is really the only good option for business. Alternatives like blip.tv exist but have average skins, average encode quality, and worse availability issues than Vimeo a lot of the time. Strongly recommend: use YouTube, it’s top-tier in terms of ease of use and much lower risk than most other externalised video hosts.

Down the track, hosting your own content on a CDN is probably the best way to do monetized video. There are some commercial options, but none of them are amazing, few of them are geared towards content-protected monetization and nearly all of them are expensive.

Alongside all these issues is the question of video storage/archival. Even for non-geeks, this shouldn’t be a big deal to get right — external terabyte hard drives cost south of $100 these days. In practice, though, continuity and archival of content is a big deal for many users — especially where content is shot ‘straight to camera’ with little other production involved (so no incidental copies are made transferring between computers, etc.). If you’re rolling your own video and not backing it up, stay clear of any service that might remove your only copy of valuable IP in the event that they realise you’re using their service.

Nevertheless, for shortlived campaigns and clearly non-profit activities — and no, your consulting business’ free advice doesn’t count — it’s probably worth the risk for many organisations. The lack of a clear regulatory framework makes Vimeo a bad choice for business, and Vimeo know it — this is not an accidental oversight on their part that you should hope means you can ‘get away with it’.

There’s been speculation that Vimeo’s parent company, IAC, is going to either reform Vimeo’s product mix or use its technology stack to develop a business offering segmented entirely from the Vimeo community. However, a quick look at the other web properties owned by IAC makes it pretty clear that it’s a B2C and social media business — with consumer focus — through and through. My take is that if you hold your breath for a B2B video solution from them you’ll sooner pass out than succeed online.