News archive
JPEG Saver 5.2
JPEG Saver 5.2 is one of those versions that doesn't really look any different from the outside. On the inside there have been some important changes, making some existing things more stable and making some things that are still on my to-do list possible.
There are some visible updates - I've made a couple of simple changes in the dialogs that make it a bit easier to use. In the background and style editor dialogs where there are two colours I've added a button in between to swap them over. This also works in the background dialog when using a mode where only one colour is enabled, allowing you to flip between two colour options.
The folders list now shows the number of enabled folders at the top as well as the total number of folders in the list. This is especially useful for me, since I have a long list of folders that I turn on and off for testing different file types, EXIF and IPTC data, automatic rotation, etc.
SVGGraph 2.29
SVGGraph 2.29 is another version that mostly changes thing internally, but there are a few more visible changes too. The most obvious change should be apparent in the example below.
Box division style
Both division_style and subdivision_style (and
their _h and _v variants) now support a new style
called "box". The Y axis in the bar graph shows how they behave
with this new style when the labels are at the division marks, and the X axis
shows what happens when the labels are between the marks (usually for bars) -
the box is drawn around the label instead of inside it. I have used the
subdivision_h option set to 0.5 to enable
subdivisions on the X axis so you can see what they look like - they would not
normally be displayed.
JPEG Saver 5.1.1
As you can probably guess from the 0.0.1 added to the version number, this is a bugfix release. There are a few annoying bugs fixed in this version though.
First, a crash when using the shape skip option with multiple displays and the secondary displays set to not show any images. That one was easy to fix, and so was a bug preventing the screensaver from automatically progressing through the images when the secondary screens were set to show the previous image.
More complicated was an unrelated but similar bug that sometimes meant that JPEG Saver would not automatically progress through the images, and sometimes not even show the first one.
SVGGraph 2.28
Over the years that I have been working on SVGGraph I have always been grumbling about text. Don't get me wrong - SVG is perfectly capable of displaying text, the problem is that I can never be sure what it is going to look like.
Version 2.28 is an attempt to improve things by using font metrics to calculate the sizes of strings of text more accurately. The two example graphs below demonstrate the difference between the new method and the older method.
Both graphs are using the "Times New Roman" font, where it is easy to see
that "Amanda" is a longer string than "Illicit". The new method is used for the
left-hand graph, where it displays the label boxes packed quite closely to the
text. The old method is enabled with the new no_font_metrics
option, shown in the right-hand graph. The label box is a bit tight around
"Amanda", but much too wide for "Illicit". There is more space at the left
side of the graph too, because the old method thinks the seven-character string
"Illicit" should be longer than the six characters of "Amanda".
JPEG Saver 5.1
JPEG Saver 5.1 is a fairly small update to version 5.0, but it does include a couple of important changes. The first of these is the replacement of JasPer with OpenJPEG. These are two different software libraries for handling JPEG 2000 images, which is still a fairly obscure format even after all these years.
If you are using JPEG 2000 images, JPEG Saver should now be able to load them a bit better. OpenJPEG actually supports loading some quite unusual images, but I didn't attempt to support them in JPEG Saver because I would have first had to figure out a way to produce the weird images for testing. So if you have some JPEG 2000 images that JPEG Saver refuses to load, please get in touch and I'll see if I can get them working.
The other quite large change is to how transitions work. It shouldn't really be noticeable in the screensaver, but internally the transitions now use a much more flexible way of deciding what happens when. This should allow for more complicated transitions in future versions.