News archive
TagCanvas 2.9
TagCanvas 2.9 adds a couple of new options, adds some extra ways to colour
the highlight and adds in missing support for the pulsate option.
The cloud above demonstrates a couple of the new options added in this version.
First, when you move the pointer of a tag you will see the highlight outline is
displayed using “marching ants”. This is configured using the new
outlineDash, outlineDashSpace and
outlineDashSpeed options. The first one sets the size of the dashes
in pixels, outlineDashSpace allows you to set a different sized space
in between the dashes, and outlineDashSpeed lets you specify how
fast the dashes move. The example cloud is using a dash size of 10 and a speed
of 4. The default speed is 1 (which is quite slow) and you can also use negative
values to make the dashes move in the opposite direction.
You may also have noticed that the highlight colour is not the same for all
the tags in the example cloud above. Version 2.9 of TagCanvas has three ways to
set the highlight colour for individual tags - the example is using the
outlineColour option set to “tag”, which tells TagCanvas
to get the highlight colour from the text of the tag's <a>
links. It also supports a value of “tagbg” to use the background
colour from the links instead. The third option for setting the highlight colour
individually is to set the weightMode to “outline”,
which colours the highlight using a weight gradient in the same way that the
“colour” weight mode sets the tag text colour according to its
weight.
SVGGraph 2.20.1
SVGGraph 2.20.1 is mainly a bugfix release, though I've fitted in a couple of new options as well. The main bug fixed in this version is in the calculation of unit values for shapes (and custom labels) when the graph axes are not in the bottom left of the graph. This happens when you have negative values or adjust the axis minimum value.
The second bug is very minor - passing an array containing a single value as a colour was being parsed as a gradient. This caused an error because there were too few colours, so now SVGGraph will just use the single colour.
The first of the new options is bar_width_min, which gives you a
bit more control over the automatic bar sizing. Up until now bars have always
had a minimum width of one pixel, and the option will continue to use a value
of 1 by default.
SVGGraph 2.20
There are two major new features in version 2.20 of SVGGraph, both of which are demonstrated in this example:
The example is a simple BarGraph with the vertical axis maximum increased a
bit so I can fit in some extra stuff. The extra stuff in this case is made up
of shapes and custom labels - configured using the new shape and
label options. All of the graph types support shapes and custom
labels, but the grid-based graphs also support positioning and sizing them on
the grid and in grid units.
These new options each have a new page to explain how to use them in detail: shapes and custom labels.
JPEG Saver 4.15a
I've learned something new in the last week - if you want the code you build with Visual Studio 2015 to run on Windows XP, you need to change the project build toolset from “Visual Studio 2015 (v140)” to “Visual Studio 2015 - Windows XP (v140_xp)”. A similar change is required for Visual Studio 2013 too, but I skipped that version.
So this JPEG Saver update is a change to a compiler option with all the same code, which is why I haven't updated the version number. If you are not running Windows XP, this version will not be any different to the version 4.15 released last week. If you are running XP, this version fixes the message about not being a valid Win32 application (and you should seriously consider upgrading from XP to something newer too - Microsoft stopped supporting XP about 18 months ago).
Download from downloads, as per usual.
JPEG Saver 4.15
To the casual observer, it might not look like much has changed in version 4.15 of JPEG Saver. The casual observer is probably right this time. The main difference in this version is that it has been compiled using Visual Studio 2015, which hopefully should not make much difference at all. Let me know if you find anything broken.
There are some real changes in this version though - there are two new background modes for a start, “Image Pile - Tiled” and “Image Pile - Fit to screen”, which do the same piling as the other pile modes, but do it on top of a background image of your choice, either tiled or scaled to fill the screen.
There is a new interactive option as well. Pressing the “a” key will switch into and out of “folder lock mode”, where the sequence of images will be locked to the folder containing the current image. The folder lock mode and the sequential mode (“Tab” key) can both be used at the same time, if you like (I don't mean press both buttons at once though - it should work, but you'll only see one of the mode change messages).