JPEG Saver 4.11
Published
Apart from the usual bug fixes and handy additions there is one new feature in JPEG Saver 4.11 that I'm a bit unsure about. I'm not sure how many people will want to use it, and I'm not sure that I can explain what it does very clearly either.
The new option should be apparent as soon as you open version 4.11's configure dialog. The “Clear database” button has moved to the “File »” menu and been replaced by a drop-down box labelled “Maximum shape skip”. The options in the drop-down are “Off” (the default), “10”, “50”, “100” and “250”. So far so good, but what do the numbers mean?
The number you choose here is how many images JPEG Saver will skip over looking for one that fits the shape of your screen. If you have a normal 4:3, 16:9 or 16:10 monitor, then it will try to pick an image that is either square or wider than it is high (a landscape format image). If you are using a monitor that has been rotated through 90° into a portrait shape, then JPEG Saver will try to find images that are square or taller than they are wide.
This is called “Maximum shape skip” because it uses the sequence of images selected in the “Mode” drop-down, checking the shape of each image it comes to and skipping over those that don't fit. So, for example, if the next 500 images are all portrait format and your screen is 1280x1024, the skip will give up after either 10, 50, 100 or 250 images (depending on your choice in the drop-down) and just display the image it finds there.
Checking the width and height of the image means looking inside the file, which could be very slow. To improve this, version 4.11 of JPEG Saver stores the width and height of the images inside its database, scanning through them in the background when the screen saver starts up. It also stores the EXIF rotation field to get it right for images that have to rotate too. This extra data means that I could add extra filters for width and height, which you will find with the other filters under the folders tab.
To make it easier to see the progress of the width and height scanning, I've
added a new %m format token to the “List info” item
that will display the number of images that have had their metadata entered into
the database. I've also added %p1 to %p9 format tokens
to the “Image info” item to display individual folders from the
path.
One feature that I've been asked about several times is the ability to switch from the current shuffled or random mode into sequential mode to view all the images in the current folder. This version makes that possible by using the “Tab” key to toggle sequential mode on and off. Of course, if you selected sequential mode in the first place, it won't make any difference.
I've improved the individual item dialogs, adding in the name field and a checkbox to enable or disable the item from its own editor, and given each type of item its own icon. My icon designs are terrible, but at least you should be able to tell them apart.
While on the config dialog, I've added a link to the online help - press “F1” and your browser will open up the relevant page for the tab you have open.
I've added two new transitions: “Corners” and “Spot Fade” and improved some of the other transition code slightly. In a future version I'm going to add an option for transition speed, so the changes should make that easier.
I've disabled the “put config files in install folder” option for Vista and newer versions of Windows. The stricter security imposed since Vista means that storing config files with JPEG Saver is not really workable. If you really want to use that option, send me an email and I'll let you know the registry key to set.
There are a couple of notable bugs fixed in this version. The first is for a simple bug introduced in version 4.10 (I think) where JPEG Saver would fail to load config files from non-boot drives. The more complicated bug is a lot older and meant that JPEG Saver would forget about images in sub-folders when a higher level folder was modified. I've been aware of this one for quite a while, but up until now I hadn't been able to reproduce it. As is often the case with these things, fixing the bug was a lot easier than finding when and where it happened.
That was a long update. Anyway, the new version is available from the downloads page.