News archive
TagCanvas 1.15
Lots of people have been asking me how to change the shape of the cloud TagCanvas produces recently, and since there were no options for doing that I have had to explain where to change things in the Javascript file to get the desired results. This new version incorporates a few new options that provide some of the changes that people have asked me about (and a couple of other changes).
The first new options change the shape of the cloud that is generated when
the script starts up. The radiusX, radiusY and
radiusZ options stretch or compress the cloud in the left-right,
up-down and in-out directions respectively. So if you want your cloud to
look like the tags are pinned to a rugby ball, you should keep the sphere
shape and set radiusX to 1.5 to elongate it horizontally. Or
you could change either the radiusY or radiusZ,
depending on which way up you want the ball to start off.
The radius[XYZ] options are fine if you want the cloud to tumble
(or if you lock the X or Y axis) but if you want the shape to remain in place
while the tags move across it, you will need the stretchX and
stretchY options. These affect the way that the cloud is drawn
when the 3D tag positions are converted to 2D canvas positions. The cloud
will normally fit best in a square canvas, so if for example you want to
fill a canvas with dimensions of 600x300, then using a
stretchX of 2 should do the trick.
SVGGraph 2.6
The new version of SVGGraph adds a number of features that have been requested several times - graph titles, axis labels and a legend for showing what the items on the graph mean.
I've resisted adding these for a long time, mainly because doing anything with
text in SVG is quite awkward. As the text is rendered in the browser using the
fonts and settings that the end user has available, SVG does not provide any
text measuring functions - so knowing how much space a line of text is going to
take up is a bit tricky. The new graph_title_*,
label_* and legend_* options are available now anyway,
and I've provided several extra options for adjusting how the text looks. In
total, there are around 40 new options in this version.
TagCanvas 1.14
This version adds support for assigning tooltips to the tags in the cloud.
Tooltips are turned off by default, so the tooltip option is
there to turn it on and specify the method to use. The option supports three
values: null being the default with no tooltips,
native to use tooltips provided by the operating system and
div to use a custom div element that can then be styled using
CSS.
Both options work by copying the contents of the title
attribute from the tag links, and using it as the tooltip text. The
native option works by changing the title
attribute of the canvas when the mouse enters or leaves a tag. This works
quite well in most browsers, though it doesn't work at all in Opera and
only works when the mouse first enters the canvas in FireFox. Which is
why I also added the div method.
SVGGraph 2.5.1
Just a quick bugfix for SVGGraph - data values of 0 were messing up the bar display for the StackedBarGraph and HorizontalStackedBarGraph types, so this update fixes it.
Updated files are available from the downloads page.
TagCanvas 1.13
TagCanvas 1.13 only has one obvious change, the addition of an option
to set the cursor type when the mouse is over a tag. The new option is
called activeCursor and is set to "pointer" by default, the
cursor normally used by the browser when hovering over a link.
The changes I still have on my to-do list are quite large, so I wanted to get this small update out of the way first. The updated stand alone and jQuery plugin files are now available on the TagCanvas page.