News archive
JPEG Saver 5.3
JPEG Saver 5.3 is a strange update, adding something I really didn't want to do. For several years various JPEG Saver functions haven't worked well, and it was all down to a change that Microsoft made to how screensavers work. This is going to take some explanation.
The problem
The whole reason JPEG Saver has been having trouble is a change Microsoft made in about Windows 8 that meant Windows now starts a screensaver on its own desktop. I suspect the reason behind this is security related, but it doesn't provide a lot of protection as far as I can tell. The screensaver still has access to all the user's files, but it can't directly interact with the main desktop display.
Whatever the reason for the change, it broke all the JPEG Saver features that did want to interact with the main desktop:
SVGGraph 3.0.1
SVGGraph 3.0.1 is a bugfix release, but there are a lot of changes in it. Sometimes you just have to rip up the floorboards to kill that annoying insect.*
2,75px s'il vous plaƮt
The bug that caused all these changes is a very simple one: PHP automatically converts numbers to strings using its current locale. This makes perfect sense, but it meant that running SVGGraph in a locale that uses a comma instead of a full-stop for the decimal separator produced garbled SVG output. SVG always uses a full-stop for its decimal separator, with commas or spaces used for separating values.
SVGGraph 3.0
In my last news item I said I was going to work on version 3.0 of SVGGraph next, and that is what I have been doing. There is a lot more I want to do, but I could have spent months tinkering on the new version without ever being completely happy with it. So here it is.
The example EmptyGraph above is something that I thought might be useful, and will become more useful when something else I have planned comes to fruition. At the moment it can be used to draw shapes and labels, plus it supports the graph title, border and background options. You can assign values, colours and links, but it doesn't do anything with them and you can get away with code as simple as this:
require 'SVGGraph/autoloader.php';
$graph = new Goat1000\SVGGraph\SVGGraph(600, 300);
$graph->render('EmptyGraph');
SVGGraph 2.30
This version of SVGGraph adds some more options for drawing things on the
graph, building on the existing shape
option. The graph below is
the example from the shapes page with the
new features added.
The main difference in this version is the addition of the figure
option, which defines named shapes or groups of shapes that can then be used as
shapes, in other figures, or as markers on scatter and line graphs. The example
graph above has one figure defined and used three times for the red squares with
the shaded box over the top.
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.