News archive
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 The “Clear database” button has moved to the “File »” menu and been replaced by a drop-down box labelled “Maximum shape skip”.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.
TrayBlank 1.5.1
What? Another version of TrayBlank just a couple of days after the last one? Yes, there was a bug in version 1.5 that meant it could crash if it was started up without a screen saver already being set. Fixing this bug is the only difference in TrayBlank itself.
The installer though, is a bit different. For the version 1.5 installer I enabled the selection of installing for the current user or for all users. It sounds quite useful - except that it didn't work. I've taken the option back out again and now the installer will always install for all users.
As an alternative for people who don't like installers, this time I've included a zip file containing the TrayBlank.exe and the ReadMe.txt files. You can run TrayBlank.exe from anywhere you like - it stores its hotkey settings in the registry, but that's it.
TrayBlank 1.5
This new version of TrayBlank is a bit smaller, and a bit more useful. It displays the currently selected screen saver in the tooltip, and there is an extra submenu for choosing how long the timeout is before the screen saver starts automatically.
The timeout submenu displays a tick or check symbol next to the current timeout value - but only if it happens to be one of the values in the menu. Obviously you can still set the timeout to whatever value you like using the Control Panel.
For people who are interested in this kind of thing, setting the timeout
works by calling the SystemParametersInfo() function with the
SPI_SETSCREENSAVETIMEOUT option. The timeout value that Windows
uses is actually in seconds, so remember that if you decide to use the function
in your own software.
JPEG Saver 4.10.1
I was expecting a lot of bug reports after the big changes that I made in version 4.10. There really haven't been many, so version 4.10.1 fixes a couple of things and adds a few extra bits and pieces.
The one big bug that was reported to me was also the one that I already knew about: version 4.10 doesn't skip over bad images, displaying an error message instead. I had left the bad image skipping out of that version because the way that it worked in version 4.9 would have had problems with the more multi-threaded environment in version 4.10. For version 4.10.1 I have added bad image skipping back in using a different method.
The first change you are likely to notice in the new version comes when you open up the configuration dialog. All the dialogs open in the middle of the screen now, to prevent them ending up behind the taskbar when it has been moved to the top or side of the screen. After years of them opening in the top-left, I'm still getting used to this change.