JPEG Saver 4.14
Published
JPEG Saver 4.14 doesn't contain anything truly amazing, but it does have a new item for adding to the display: an analog clock. I first played with an analog clock item back in 2010, drawing the hands as Direct3D meshes. It worked, but it looked awful so I shelved the code. The analog clock in version 4.14 works the same way that the text clock does - drawing to an off-screen bitmap and then pasting it on top. It looks a lot better and makes it easier to preview the clock in the item configuration dialog.
I thought about adding a shadow option to the analog clock, but then I realised it was already easy enough to do using JPEG Saver's items list. Set up your clock the way you want it to look then create a copy, set the colour of the copy to grey (or whatever colour you want the shadow to be), change the offset by a few pixels and then drag the copy above the original clock in the items list. Items are drawn in the order they appear in the list, so the shadow should be above the main clock to be drawn first.
This version also adds some extra format tokens for the “Image info” item, for displaying some properties that can be updated in Windows Explorer. These are the title, subject, keywords (or tags), comments and author. The properties are actually stored in the Exif metadata, but are not part of the Exif standard (which is why I hadn't thought to include them before).
To improve consistency with other applications, the space bar will now pause and resume image changing (when interactive options are enabled). The “p” key will still work too. As well as this change, JPEG Saver now ignores the control key when it is not part of a combination that it wants. This is a bug fix really, as JPEG Saver should pass through any unwanted key presses to allow for controlling other applications.
There are a couple of simple bug fixes in this version, the first being some IPTC fields not being found and displayed correctly. The second was the background not being drawn, which was an easy bug to fix after I discovered that the user with this problem was using an older version of JPEG Saver with a config file that was created with a newer version. This confusion prompted me to add a version number into the config file that JPEG Saver can check, displaying a warning message if the config file version is newer that the version of JPEG Saver. Obviously this will only work with version 4.14 and newer versions, but it might save me some headaches in the long run.
I've put some work into the interactive option for rating images, as it had a tendency to fail with a useless error message. It should work more consistently now, and provide a slightly more meaningful error message when it fails to work. Most of the error messages come straight from Windows, so they can be a bit cryptic, but this one is mine: “Temp file smaller than original”. This means that JPEG Saver successfully created a new file with the updated metadata, but it is smaller than the original image. Maybe I'm paranoid, but I don't like it when you add something to a file and it gets smaller, so when this happens I delete the temp file created by JPEG Saver and leave the original intact.
The only other external change in this version is a new transition called “Warp spots”, added because I enjoy thinking up transitions. The new version is available from the downloads page.