News archive
JPEG Saver 4.12
This new version of JPEG Saver adds a feature that people have been asking me about for years and another feature that nobody has ever asked me about, as far as I can remember. There are also a few bugs fixed in this version, but since I discovered them myself I don't think they are earth-shattering.
The first new feature should be obvious to long-time users as soon as you open up the configuration dialog. The “All” and “None” buttons that were there for enabling and disabling all the transitions are gone, replaced by a slider labelled “Speed”. The slider provides some control over how fast the transitions are, with five options for multiplying the default speed: ×1/2; ×2/3; ×1 (the default speed); ×1.5; and ×2. You can see the effect of these options on all the transitions in the preview window on the dialog. All of the transitions are affected equally by the slider setting - there is still no way to slow down or speed up individual transitions.
The updated main tab
The functions of the removed “All” and “None” buttons have moved to the three-state checkbox next to the “Transitions” label above the list. The thick black dot in the checkbox means some of the transitions are enabled; clicking it will disable them all and clear the checkbox. This type of checkbox has been around for years, but I'm still not used to using it.
SVGGraph 2.15
The new version 2.15 of SVGGraph contains three new graph types and some substantial internal changes to the existing grid-based graphs. These changes are there to support drawing a second Y-axis on the right hand side of the bar, line and scatter graphs.
The new graph types are all variations on the pie graph. The donut graph is a pie graph with a hole in the middle where you can put an optional label. There is an option for how large the hole is, but apart from that it behaves like a normal pie graph. In case you are wondering, I spelled it “donut” instead of “doughnut” because of the shorter spelling, making the class and filename shorter too.
The polar area graph is a pie graph where the angle of each slice remains constant, with the value represented by the area of the slice instead. One advantage of this type of graph over a standard pie graph is that zero values are visible as gaps in the graph. The example above shows that my dough recipe has no badger in it, which could be quite reassuring.
JPEG Saver 4.11.2
Here's another minor update to JPEG Saver, fixing a couple of bugs that were reported to me and some other things that I noticed while testing and using it myself.
The most glaring bug fixed in this version is one that would rotate images incorrectly, due to my misunderstanding some of the EXIF specification. The details of how the image should be rotated to appear the right way up on the screen are stored as a field in the image's EXIF data. If JPEG Saver came across an image without an orientation field in the main block of EXIF data, it would look in the next EXIF block for the field (if there was a second block). The second block is for details about the thumbnail image that is sometimes embedded in the main image, and JPEG Saver was taking the orientation from here and rotating the main image the way that the thumbnail image should be rotated instead of leaving it unrotated. Don't ask me why the thumbnail should have a different orientation from the main image, but it can happen and now JPEG Saver should be able to cope with it.
The first bug has been around for a long time, but the second was fairly new. When JPEG Saver happened to choose the same image to display twice in a row, it was not restarting the timer to load the next image. This was because the image loading code found that the image to be loaded was already in memory so didn't bother to load it again, and also didn't bother telling the main thread that the image was loaded. This meant that the main thread sat waiting for a message that never arrived and the images stopped changing.
JPEG Saver 4.11.1
The main changes in version 4.11 of JPEG Saver were probably not all that exciting, so I've tried to add something genuinely useful in version 4.11.1 - a “Preview” button on the configuration dialog. Pressing this button will save the current settings as a new temporary file (along with a copy of the current database) and then start up the screen saver side of JPEG Saver using this temporary config. After you exit the screen saver, the configuration dialog will still be on the screen for you to make any further changes.
The two other quite noticeable changes in this version are a new “Shutters” transition, and a new option in the interactive options dialog for specifying the filename to use for the desktop wallpaper BMP file that is saved when you press the F10 key.
I've changed the way that the background metadata scan works too, to make it cause less lag when using interactive input. The scan normally checks a batch of ten files in each job, which would cause some delay to loading the next image. The batch size is now reduced to one image when you press an interactive key (or use a mouse button/wheel) and is returned to the normal batch size when the delay between images causes the next image to be loaded automatically.
JPEG Saver 4.11
Apart from the usual bug fixes and handy additions there is one new feature in JPEG Saver 4.11 that I'm a bit unsure about. I'm not sure how many people will want to use it, and I'm not sure that I can explain what it does very clearly either.
The new option should be apparent as soon as you open version 4.11's configure dialog. The “Clear database” button has moved to the “File »” menu and been replaced by a drop-down box labelled “Maximum shape skip”. The options in the drop-down are “Off” (the default), “10”, “50”, “100” and “250”. So far so good, but what do the numbers mean?
The number you choose here is how many images JPEG Saver will skip over looking for one that fits the shape of your screen. If you have a normal 4:3, 16:9 or 16:10 monitor, then it will try to pick an image that is either square or wider than it is high (a landscape format image). If you are using a monitor that has been rotated through 90° into a portrait shape, then JPEG Saver will try to find images that are square or taller than they are wide.