News archive
JPEG Saver 5.22.1
If you are one of those people who like to wait for the .1 release, then this is the version for you. Actually, it's for anyone who downloaded version 5.22 as well because it fixes a crashy bug.
Metadata troubles
All the changes in this version are related to the metadata scan. The most important is that the screensaver was quietly crashing after completing the metadata scan at times. Not all the time though - only when it had already scheduled a burst of metadata to be scanned before the current burst had completed the scan.
The next problem was that the improved metadata scan in version 5.22 also meant it was quite slow to start up, which held up loading images, which in turn caused navigation to fail, staggered multi-monitor updates to not be staggered, and some other annoyances. I've split the startup into smaller parts so this won't be a problem again.
JPEG Saver 5.22
There are some big changes in this version. Unfortunately they are the type of big changes that happen behind scaffolding and when it is taken away you wonder what has actually changed. But believe me, these are big changes.
Big changes
The way JPEG Saver chooses the next image has changed a lot in this version. Previously, each change mode had its own code that would choose the next image, either by picking one at random or one from a shuffled list of images, or just the next in sequence. The new way uses a database table that contains the list of images to be displayed. Each of the change modes fills in the table with files in the correct order, and then the next image to load is picked from there.
But why?
For a start, this is a lot simpler. Each change mode now just contains enough code to fill in the image list table, and maybe some extra code to deal with sequential and folder lock modes.
JPEG Saver 5.21.2
I enjoyed that last JPEG Saver .1 release so much, I decided to have a .2 to go with it.
Windows 7 is still a thing
I'm not using it myself, but Windows 7 is still at large and there is no good reason why JPEG Saver should not work on it.
Unfortunately there were a couple of bad reasons why the last version didn't work on Windows 7, mainly my use of some path manipulation functions that don't exist in older versions of Windows. This version replaces them with something more widely supported.
SVGGraph 3.17
Version 3.17 of SVGGraph is a small update with three new options and a couple of bugs fixed. Nothing Gantt-related this time.
Spread out
Here is an example multi-line graph to demonstrate the new options.
The first new option probably isn't obvious from the example, but its name is
axis_tightness_x. There was already a axis_tightness_y
for allowing more space between the data and the axis end, the X-axis version is
for removing space between the values and the end of the axis. In the example
above the final X-axis value is 41, but the last division is at 40 - without the
axis_tightness_x option set to 0 this axis would end at 50 and leave
a data-free gap at the end.
JPEG Saver 5.21.1
It's time for a .1 release, because there hasn't been one of those for a long time and I missed the excitement of it all. No, it's because I found a bug.
Where has my icon gone?
The main bug fixed in this version is in the desktop helper. It was quietly crashing when trying to update the database, an error caused by my adding in some code to load the file cache size option. The desktop helper doesn't even use the file cache, so I can't even claim it was crashing for a good reason.
This bug isn't all bad though, it prompted me to add compile-time validation for the option values so things like this should be a lot less likely in the future.