Prolost

Rebel Café

Announcing Rebel Café, a forum for discussing issues related to The Guide.

There are a number of ideas in The Guide that could touch off much deeper conversations, and the blog was just starting to feel a little one-way, you know? Check it out and let me know if you think it's a good idea. I may not always be quick to respond in either venue, but at least with the Café there might be another rebel who can help you out.

(Thanks to all the readers who reported in after the last post—I gave the first few folks who emailed a sneak preview of the Café and they seemed to dig it!)

Make PNGs Not Suck

Mac users, read The Sad Story of PNG Gamma, and then download GammaSlamma.

In short, PNG is a potentially useful file format hampered by a well-intentioned but disasterous attempt at simple color management. But when you remove the bogus Gamma flag from a PNG file, you've got an elegant and free cross-platform lossless image format.

Windows users can aparently strip out PNG Gamma flags with PNGCRUSH.

I've tested neither of these, so please let me know if they work for you!

Rebel Update

Good news abounds!

Amazon now says The Guide "Usually ships within 3 to 6 weeks," which is code for "Hey, it finally occured to us to order some copies of this book that we've been accepting preorders on for over half a year." My insiders say that they should actually be shipping all preorders in about two weeks.

Amazon customers, please post a comment when and if you get a message from Amazon indicating that the March ship dates were a big, hateful lie, designed to cause strife and keep you from making a movie.

Some enterprising Amazon Marketplace sellers have some copies for sale, some of which are available now. Check out "More Buying Choices" on the Amazon product page.

Barnes & Noble show that they ship The Guide within 24 hours. Rock on, BN.

And of course Peachpit is still happy to sell it to you online or at Macworld next week.