News archive
SVGGraph 2.11
This new version of SVGGraph contains some quite major changes, mainly to support a new method of specifying the data to show on the graphs. I've called the new data format “structured data” and you can read about it on the new structured data page.
The main advantage of the new structured data format is that it allows for bundling other information along with the data fields. At the moment this is limited to tooltips, colours, labels, links and the text shown on the X-axis, but I plan to add more support in future.
JPEG Saver 4.8
The main changes to this version of JPEG Saver are in the resizing options, though they are a bit more obvious than the previous changes I made there in version 4.7.1. I've split the resizing options up so that you can specify a maximum size for images to be scaled down to, and a minimum size for images to be scaled up to. You can choose a different resizing method for smaller and larger images as well.
Also new to the resizing options section is the choice over whether to resize by percentage or pixels. The percentage method is the old way, where 100% means that the image is scaled to fit the screen by width or height depending on the shape of the image and screen. Resizing by pixels scales the image to fit its longest edge to the given length in pixels. Resizing by pixels also allows you to specify a size that is larger than your screen, instead of being limited to 100% in percentage mode.
I've also made improvements to the way the border item works. If you are resizing by percentage, then the border sizes are taken into account when calculating the new image size to keep the borders on the screen. There are also some new options available to specify which edges are drawn for the borders, and how the lines end.
TagCanvas 2.1
This is minor update to TagCanvas, but could be very useful for anyone wanting
to use the Update function. The shuffleTags option can now be used
along with Update without the tags becoming unshuffled again. The Reload
function still re-shuffles the tags if you call it and shuffleTags
is enabled.
The new TagCanvas files are available from the main TagCanvas page.
JPEG Saver 4.7.1
This new version of JPEG Saver was supposed to be a quick bug-fix, but I ended up putting in a couple of things from the to-do list. I fixed the bug too.
One thing that has been on the list for a long time is loading of text files to display on the screen, and this version has a new “Text file” item available. I tested it by writing a Python script for randomly inserting quotations into a file every 20 seconds, but you can use it for anything you like. I've limited it to reading the first 50 lines from the file - if that is a problem for you, let me know and I'll increase the limit or make it an option.
One thing that was holding me back from adding the text file item was the lack of any text formatting options. Version 4.7.1 adds left, right and centre align options for all of the text items. Obviously this is only useful if your text item spans multiple lines.
TagCanvas 2.0
Every now and then I get an email from someone saying that they want to update the list of tags in the cloud using AJAX or plain Javascript. My response has always been “It's a bit tricky, blah blah blah, wait for version 2.” So here is version 2.0, with a new “Update” function for replacing tags while the cloud is in motion:
To keep things simple, you just have to call TagCanvas.Update('canvasID')
and it reloads the list of tags from the same container element that was
specified to start with. There is also a new “Reload” function for
reloading the tags without attempting to keep their positions.
The changes to make this work involved some serious updates to the way TagCanvas
animates things. It will now use requestAnimationFrame (or a
prefixed version) if the browser supports it and falls back to using
setTimeout otherwise. The interval option is still
used as a factor in the speed of the cloud when using
requestAnimationFrame to maintain a similar speed with or without
it.