News archive
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.
JPEG Saver 4.7
This is the first released version of JPEG Saver compiled with Visual C++ 2010. The previous version was compiled using the 2003 compiler, so I've avoided adding too many new features into this version in case the compiler change has caused any problems. The change of compiler also meant an update to the latest version of the DirectX 9 SDK, so this version relies on “d3dx9_43.dll” instead of “d3dx9_39.dll” - so I recommend ticking the “DirectX update” option in the installer.
I've improved the on-screen feedback in this version, so when you press one of the interactive keys that does something behind the scenes you will see a message in the middle of the screen that fades out after a couple of seconds. Pausing and resuming will display the standard pause and play icons in the bottom-right of the screen too.
There are a few new interactive features added - the “s” key will create a shortcut to the current file, and the “1”-“5” keys along the top of the main keyboard will set the image's rating, as used by Windows 7 and others. Rating is disabled by default since it modifies the image files, so you must enable it in the new interactive options dialog that is available via a button on the main tab. You can also set where the shortcuts are created in this dialog, instead of creating them on the desktop. The other new interactive option is a “help page” - a list of all the keys will be displayed for 10 seconds when you press the “h” key.
TagCanvas 1.19.1
There are two new options and one bug fixed in this minor update to TagCanvas.
The new weightSizeMin and weightSizeMax options can
be used to specify the minimum and maximum font sizes to use when using weighted
tags. This is instead of the normal method of determining the font size from
the tag itself or its data attribute.
The bug fixed in this version is the targetting of frames and iframes, which wasn't working before. One thing to note if you really must use a frameset is that IE9 puts the frame documents into quirks mode if you do not set the correct DOCTYPE for the frameset document. In quirks mode, TagCanvas doesn't work - the canvas element is not recognised.
The updated files are available from the TagCanvas page.