News archive
TagCanvas 2.10
It has been over five years since I released the last version of TagCanvas. That's mainly because I didn't have anything useful to do with it - I had a few suggestions from users that were either very unlikely to be useful to anyone else, or were somewhere between impractical and impossible to implement.
I wonder how you're feeling
That changed recently when someone suggested making the tags emit a sound when the mouse hovers over them. That sounded like a really good idea to me. I don't think anyone has asked for it before, and if they have then I'm sorry it has taken me this long to get around to it. (Though there are things on my to-do lists for other projects that have been hanging around for longer.)
So that's what this version is all about. The example below uses a few .ogg files from the Motion Monkey Free Retro Arcade Sounds Pack to demonstrate the two ways that TagCanvas 2.10 supports playing sounds.
JPEG Saver 5.13
This new version of JPEG Saver is another that doesn't look very interesting, but it does contain some important changes.
Automatic database updates
The desktop helper now has a menu labelled “Update automatically”, where you can enable this new feature and choose how often it updates. I've been using it for several weeks set to 6-hourly updates without noticing any problems (or noticing it at all to be honest) so I'm confident it doesn't do any harm.
SVGGraph 3.8
SVGGraph 3.8 is another release focussed on small improvements. There are two new graph types though, since someone asked how to display a stepped line graph and I didn't have an easy answer.
Stepped line graphs
I don't think anyone has ever asked for this before, but it was very easy to
add. The two new graph types are SteppedLineGraph and
MultiSteppedLineGraph. They behave exactly the same as normal line
graphs, but the line progresses in steps instead of straight lines between the
data points.
The best-fit lines follow the same path as on normal line graphs, based on the position of the markers. All of the usual line graph options are available, though there is no stacked version of the graph because it looked very strange when I tried it out. If you really want a stacked, stepped line graph I can add it quite easily, just contact me at the usual address.
JPEG Saver 5.12
This is a very unexciting version of JPEG Saver. Sorry. But it does contain some important updates and fixes.
Updates
• Probably the most useful update is that JPEG Saver will now load
image files with incorrect extensions, as long as they have an extension that
is one of the types that it recognises. The files will not be renamed or
anything, JPEG Saver will just try loading a strange file as all the other
types it knows about before giving up. In other words, a GIF file
saved as rickroll.jpeg will be loaded, but a JPEG file
saved as history.txt will not.
SVGGraph 3.7
SVGGraph 3.7 has a few more useful updates in it, improving some existing functions and adding some more features.
Average lines
This has been on the to-do list for a long time, mainly because I thought it
would already be quite simple to do using the shape options. Not as simple as
adding the new show_average option to your SVGGraph settings though.
I have actually implemented these average lines using guidelines, which means a
whole load of styling options are available without much extra work.
The example shows the first two average lines drawn behind the graph and the third on top of it. It's probably not a good idea to mix them on a 3D graph because the distance between the horizontal lines doesn't reflect the actual values, but it does show how the two types of line are drawn.