News archive
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.
CRCDropper 3.2
This new version of CRCDropper came about because I wanted to play with some of the things that Windows 7 can do - specifically, displaying progress in the taskbar.
It actually turned out to be really easy: first, make sure the taskbar
button exists, then use the
ITaskbarList3::SetProgressValue
function to set the range and amount completed in one step. When the
process has finished, the taskbar button can be set back to normal using
ITaskbarList3::SetProgressState with TBPF_NOPROGRESS. I like it when things
are this simple.
I've also spent some time cleaning up the progress bars on the dialog, since they didn't seem to be working very consistently. The updated version is available from the downloads page.
Glowspot 1.1
A new year, and the first new release is an updated version of Glowspot. The previous version was limited to being used on elements that did not have any existing background images (because it would replace them with the glow image) so version 1.1 fixes that.
The updated version takes advantage of the multiple background image CSS
support in modern browsers and adds the glow image on top of any
existing images. This should have been easy to do, but IE9 made things a
bit tricky. IE9 supports setting the background-position
attribute, but doesn't reliably support reading it, so I have had to
make use of its background-position-x and
background-position-y attributes, which do work.
The updated files are on the Glowspot page.
TagCanvas fonts and colours
I promised to create a page that would explain how to make multiple fonts
and colours work in the latest version of TagCanvas, so that's what I've
done. The new page is here and has
a few examples showing what can be done with a null in the
right place.
TagCanvas 1.12
This version of TagCanvas has a few new features, the first of which comes
from the new option outlineMethod. This option changes the
way that the highlighted tag under the cursor appears. The default setting
of "outline" looks a lot like the old outline method, but with the
rectangle drawn at the same depth as the selected tag (so parts of it could
be covered by any tags that are closer to the front of the cloud).
The old way of displaying the outline on top is available using "classic" as the setting, or there are two new settings that looks quite different. The "block" setting draws a solid rectangle behind the active tag, and the "colour" setting draws the text (or image) of the active tag in the outline colour. The "colour" method does not support pulsating at the moment, but I expect I'll get it working in a future version. Colour doesn't work for images on IE8 and below either, but I don't expect to fix that before my next skiing holiday to Hell.
The other new features are multi-font and multi-colour support. The way
these work is fairly simple: set the textColour or
textFont options to null, and TagCanvas will
pick up the font and/or colour to use for the tags from the links used
to generate the cloud. That doesn't sound very clear, so I expect I'll
upload a page of examples soon to explain it a bit better.