JPEG Saver 5.6
Published
So it's a new year and a new version of JPEG Saver. It's also Blue Monday today, apparently, but all that means to me is the New Order song that I can't seem to separate from that other New Order song. You know - the one with the weird video. But anyway…
Transition speed
The most significant and obvious update in this version is how the speed of transitions is controlled. In earlier versions the speed slider on the main config dialog had five settings, going from half-speed up to double-speed. Now the slider uses percentages for the speed, and ranges from 25% up to 300%. There is a blue bar on the slider that shows the old range of values, and the slider can be adjusted in 5% increments.
Above the slider is a new checkbox marked “Random” which enables using a random speed for each transition. By that I mean each image change gets its own random speed, not that each named transition gets its own random speed. Setting the speed of each named transition individually is still on the to-do list, but you can't do that yet.
The random transition speed is chosen from the blue area on the speed slider, which goes from 50% up to 200%. This might sound like a top-heavy distribution, but the algorithm takes that into account and you should experience an even mix of faster and slower transitions.
More transition updates
The next update is also in the main dialog, and it makes the first enabled transition in the list selected when the dialog opens. So what that means is that opening the config dialog and pressing the transition preview button will preview the first transition you have enabled instead of always selecting the “Bar Slide” transition because it comes first in the list.
I also spent some time trying to get the transition preview window to start with one image and transition to the next instead of starting completely black. Due to the way this works I haven't entirely fixed it, but there has been some improvement.
I've added in a couple of new transitions too, “Tile Slide” and “Random Tile Slide”. These are quite simple transitions that slide sections of the screen around in different directions, but the effect is quite nice.
Fixes and tweaks
I added a quick database integrity check in at the start of the screen saver, just to avoid the possibility of crashing out early or a very long wait for the database to become ready. This kind of problem should be very rare, but now it will be even rarer. I've tuned the database settings to make things slightly more resilient too.
There is one quite annoying bug fixed in this version - the “Finding images…” text wasn't fading out when the images were being displayed. This was really puzzling, but I managed to fix it in the end.
The other minor update is to the list of filter presets - I've added in the years 2019 and 2020, and also added in presets for 4K and 8K resolutions. I don't have a 4K or 8K monitor, but some people might and images in these sizes are likely to become more common over time.
Ah! “True Faith” - that's the one with the weird video
The new version of JPEG Saver is available from the downloads page.