JPEG Saver 5.33
Published
This new version took longer than I wanted and has less new stuff in it than I wanted too. But here it is anyway.
Flipping HEIC
Support for loading HEIC images was really easy to add using the libheif library. It still took me two weeks though, because I thought it would be a good idea to use a package manager for a change. Until now I have been manually compiling the libraries that JPEG Saver uses, which can be quite a pain.
Enter vcpkg
vcpkg is a simple, easy to use package manager that works with Visual Studio and makes it easy to add, update and manage dependencies.
In theory.
In my case it worked some of the time and then didn't work at other times. Switching between 64 and 32 bit configurations or between Release and Debug builds would mess things up every time. It appears that vcpkg doesn't handle that at all well.
I expect vcpkg works well with new projects, but trying to stuff it into the ancient JPEG Saver codebase just didn't work out.
Conan the Barbarian other one I tried
I also tried out Conan, though I ran into some other problems there. I might have been able to get it working eventually, but the point of a package manager is to make things easier and that wasn't happening.
In the end I gave up and wrote my own scripts to download, build, install and patch libraries - they work well enough and I can fix them if they break.
Progress at last
This version of JPEG Saver also adds a progress bar for videos. By default it is turned off, but you can cycle through the various display modes by pressing the '.' key. You can also set the startup mode and the bar's opacity from the video options dialog.
Bugs, etc.
There is one small fix in this version, and it is actually in the installer. For some reason the “Configure” icon in the Start menu had stopped working at some point, with its target pointing to the wrong place to run the Control Panel's Screensaver settings app.
Trojan?
There is one thing I haven't fixed, and that is that JPEG Saver's installer is being reported as containing a trojan by some virus scanners. As far as I can make out it is because of the Desktop Helper Launcher utility that is included. It's a very short program that starts up JPEG Saver passing in some arguments to tell it to run in the background.
That's all the program does, and I think that is also why it is being identified as a trojan. I haven't thought of a way around it for this version, but in version 5.34 I might get rid of the launcher and just include another copy of JPEG Saver itself instead. That should work, right?
Download here
The updated installers are available from the downloads page.