News archive
JPEG Saver 5.42
Apart from fixing quite a few bugs, JPEG Saver 5.42 actually adds something new.
Make a splash
The first new thing in this version is a splash screen. Of course it is optional, and you can choose what it looks like, but it is just a splash screen. I added this because I was asked if I could add an option to specify the first image shown. This isn't quite the same as that, but it got me thinking that a splash screen could be useful, so here it is.
If you just enable the splash screen and don't choose an image JPEG Saver will display its built-in preview image. If you do choose your own image, JPEG Saver will not do any processing to it, just display it centred on the screen as-is. This just supports static images though, so no videos.
JPEG Saver 5.41
This is a smaller update - I had hoped to get more done, but things turned out to be trickier than I had expected. There are a couple of awkward bugs fixed too.
Revisiting the logo item
I'm not good at naming things, and "logo" doesn't really describe what the item does very well at all. I might rename it to "overlay image" or something more useful in a future version.
The actual change I did make in this version was to add support for loading a logo image from a folder of images instead of just using a single image. This uses a similar method to background images, adding the folder to the database to be scanned at startup.
JPEG Saver 5.40
This is another release that improves things without adding much. It fixes a couple of bugs too.
Better logging
Logging was something that JPEG Saver could do, but it was very limited and inefficient. For this version I have made it more efficient and more capable, so I can actually make more use of it in the future.
Because of this, I have added the existing logging options that were previously only available by editing the config file into the debug dialog. You can set the log file location, enable logging of image/video loading and transitions, and toggle logging altogether.
JPEG Saver 5.39
It's only been a couple of weeks since version 5.38 was released, but version 5.39 fixes some quite annoying bugs and ticks off an item that has been on my to-do list for about two years.
Background information
The background modes that use a folder of images have been getting more and more clunky over the years, and version 5.38 made things worse. I decided the best way to fix it was to address item #618 from my issue tracking software: “Store background images in main database”.*
In previous versions JPEG Saver was scanning the background images folder into a temporary database at each startup. It was slow and inefficient, especially if you had a lot of background images. Version 5.38 made things worse somehow, though I didn't waste any time trying to figure out why and went straight to the long term solution.
JPEG Saver 5.38
Over time I add more and more stuff to JPEG Saver, and it eventually slows things down. So every now and then I have to spend some time speeding things up again. This is one of those versions.
I feel the need…
There are several things I have done in this version to make things run faster. I won't describe them in detail because none of them are very interesting, but the upside is that the initial file scan should be faster and changing between images should be faster. Also, the time JPEG Saver takes to build the file list at the start of each run should be shorter.
No colours anymore
There is one new option in this version, “Greyscale images” on the Position/Resize tab. It makes JPEG Saver display all the foreground images or videos in greyscale. It doesn't affect anything else.