News archive
TagCanvas 2.6.1
TagCanvas 2.6.1 is another quick bug-fix release, just fixing one bug that could be quite annoying. The new canvas tooltip supported by version 2.6 would display its div at the end of the page when TagCanvas started up. This version fixes that, and nothing else. So if you are not using div-based tooltips, this new version should not act any differently to version 2.6.
In other news, I've had a growing number of people contacting me about problems with using TagCanvas on the Android browser. There appear to be quite a few issues with using an HTML5 canvas on the Android browser, with all sorts of workarounds that may or may not solve the problems: Google search for “android browser canvas problems”.
I don't have anything that will run the Android browser, so I haven't made any attempt to solve these problems in the TagCanvas script. My advice for now is to search the web for similar Android canvas bugs and see if there are any changes that you can make to your HTML or CSS that will fix things for your application.
TagCanvas 2.6
TagCanvas 2.6 really only adds one new feature, with a few options to go with it. The example cloud below shows the new mixed text and image tags in action.
A piece of paper with a clip on it
Speech bubble
A calendar
A monitor
A box with tape on it
A shiny carrier bag
A clock
Whirrr... click
You have mail
The first new option is imageMode and determines how TagCanvas
deals with text and images found in the links it uses to create the tags. The
default behaviour is to act the way it always used to do, displaying an image
if there is one, or the link text otherwise. The imageMode option
allows you to choose
to only display images (imageMode = 'image'), only display text
(imageMode = 'text'), or display text and images on a single tag
(imageMode = 'both'). The default fallback option is used when
imageMode is null.
The imagePosition option specifies where the image goes in
relation to the text, and imagePadding is the amount of space
between the image and the text. For positioning the text and image within the
bounding box of the tag, there are imageAlign,
imageVAlign, textAlign and textVAlign
options. Apart from textAlign, these options are only useful when
mixed image and text tags are in use.
SVGGraph 2.17
Quite often changes happen to SVGGraph, or any of the software I release, due to requests from users. Sometimes users send me code that they have used to improve the software themselves - version 2.17 of SVGGraph includes both of these types of update.
The most obvious change in this version is the addition of a load of new functions for setting the colours used to draw the different bars or pie slices. I've been unhappy with the way SVGGraph deals with colour selection for quite a long time, but I haven't done anything about it until now because it worked well enough. Recently someone sent me through some code that added support for using a range of colours, and I liked it enough to incorporate it into the system. It meant overhauling the way that colours are picked, and it also gave me the chance to add a function for setting different colours for each dataset on a multi-dataset graph. This example shows two different colour ranges on one stacked bar graph.
The old $graph->Colours() function still works the same way,
and setting $graph->colours directly still works too. Setting
individual bar colours using structured data will still override any colour
settings as well. The new colour functions are listed on the
functions page, and are demonstrated on the
colours, gradients and patterns
page.
JPEG Saver 4.13.1
This new version of JPEG Saver doesn't have a lot of new stuff in it, but does add a couple of things that people have asked me for lately.
The first is a new image selection mode available from the drop-down list on the main tab. The new mode is called “Alphanumeric” and sorts the list of images by filename, ignoring the folders in a similar way to the “Chronological” mode. The selection is also sorted by file date and time, so if you have multiple files called e.g. “15.jpg”, they will be displayed in order of age.
The second change is a new background mode. Actually, it's two new background modes, since I couldn't decide which worked better and decided to include both. They are called “Image average” and “Image edge average”, and both fill the background with a solid colour. The first one chooses a colour by averaging the colours of all the pixels in the foreground image, and the second looks at a 2-pixel border around the edge of the foreground image and averages the colours it finds there.
SVGGraph 2.16
SVGGraph 2.16 is not a huge update, but it does include a new graph type and several changes that I have been asked about over the last few months. There are a couple of bugs fixed too.
The new graph type is a stacked and grouped bar graph, for when some of your data adds up and some should be compared. That's a terrible description. I'll try an example.
I picked these numbers out of thin air to produce a nice graph, so don't try to figure out what they are showing. The graph shows four datasets, with the first and second drawn in a stack with red and blue gradients and the third and fourth datasets drawn in a stack with red and blue polkadot patterns.