Adobe Fireworks CS3 Bug - Forced Bit Depths

I just figured out today that Fireworks will force lower bit-depths if the amount of colors warrants it. Exporting an 8-bit PNG that's solid black? Fireworks will export it as 1-bit. Have 16 colors in your image? That's 4-bit for you. 4 colors? 2-bit.

This is all fine and dandy, since I imagine that these lower bit depths compress better. The problem is, not everyone and everything supports them, like this phone I'm working on. It won't render anything less than 8-bit. This needs to be an option in Fireworks, not on by default.

To fix this, I'm manually adding colors to the indexed palettes of the 8-bit PNG's I'm exporting, unchecking the "Removed unused colors" box at the bottom. This is allowing me to get the colors up to 17 in order for Fireworks to export these as I need them.

I tell people all the time about Fireworks' ability to work with PNGs, how it supports alpha transparency for bit-depths that not even Photoshop does. But this bug is just kinda dumb.

Convert to uppercase

Sometimes the project you're working on requires you to type things out in all caps. Maybe it's required by the client's lawyers, maybe it's just part of the design aesthetic. I've had projects where the designer wanted all of the text in caps, but all of the legalese and copy was handed over to me in Sentence case. When I'm handed a 3-4 page document of rules or terms, the last thing I want to do is spend my night typing it out.

For this, just open up Microsoft Word, paste in the text to be converted to uppercase, select all and Shift-F3. VOILA! I use this method because, for the life of me, I can't find the "To Uppercase" function in Word 2007.

Yes, I know I could probably do this dynamically in Flash, append ".toUppercase" to some code in my ActionScript, but not all projects are Flash and having to do that seems silly.

Software Pimpin' #1: SyncBack Freeware (PC)

We live in an age where all of our memories, all of our work, everything we do, is on our computers. I remember going through dad's tall file cabinet when I was younger, rummaging through all the years worth of photos he had in that second drawer. Now, everyone has a digital camera. Gone are the days of 30 or so processed rolls from your youth. These days, youngsters are going to have their entire lives broadcast and memorialized, through hundreds of thousands of digital photos and videos on YouTube. You can't see my sister's walls in her home with the absurd amounts of photos she puts up, I can't imagine how many photos she'd have if she actually had a digital camera.

At home, I have schoolwork and projects back from 1998-1999. Websites and artwork from my college, portfolio pieces from 2000, years and years of my life in work, taking up 0s and 1s on my computer's 7 year old hard drive. A lot of it really awful, but I keep it around for the memories behind them.

That said, this last week my coworker booted into her Macbook Pro and a cute little folder with a question mark popped up on her screen. What wasn't so cute is that this icon was basically telling her that her hard drive crashed and was DOA. Everything she had on it, gone. A year's worth of work, PSD files, Illustrator files, her own stock artwork and originals, gone. Can they get that back? Maybe, but I doubt they can recover the entire drive and even if they do, have you looked into how much hard drive recovery costs these days?

So this has lit a fire under me. I have 9 years worth of digital photos, 10+ years worth of artwork and portfolio pieces, 10+ years of important documents, sitting on that old Pentium 3 in my office. My life and memories can be gone in an instant.

Today I stumbled across a program called SyncBack Freeware (PC). It's as easy a backup program you could ask for, allowing you to automate backing up to external drives, FTP sites and more. It took me literally 20 minutes to setup, and now my computer at midnight, every night, will backup my work and my life to my Dreamhost backup account and an external hard drive. I really wanted the new HP EX487 MediaSmart Server, but going this route for now will save me about $600+ dollars.

I found an article about it at Lifehacker, where you'll find a link to it as well: http://lifehacker.com/software/geek-to-live/geek-to-live-automatically-back-up-your-hard-drive-147855.php

Maybe you're already backed up. I hope you are. For me, I just had this feeling like I needed to do it, but it really wasn't a rush. My coworker, although it sucks that she became a guinea pig for data loss, really proved to me that I can't put this off any longer.