News archive
TagCanvas 1.10
There are only a couple of changes in this new version of TagCanvas, but one of them is fairly important. The lesser one is an update to the mouse movement handler to make sure that the tags are always highlighted correctly - in previous versions TagCanvas would store its position at startup and use it to calculate where the mouse was, but now it checks each time the mouse moves over the canvas. This means anything moving the canvas itself should not mess up the tag selection.
The second change is slightly more visible, and changes the way the text is
converted to images when the txtOpt mode is enabled (which is by
default on browsers that support it). A new option, txtScale is
used to create a higher resolution version of the tag text, so that when the
tag is "nearer" to the front it doesn't look too blocky. The default value of
2 means that the text is doubled in size on the image, which should give the
tags smooth-looking text in most cases.
If you are using extreme values for the zoom or
depth options, then values of 3 or 4 (or somewhere in between)
may give a better result. On the other hand, if you want the text to look
like it was rendered by a ZX Spectrum with a faulty RF modulator, values
below 1 will make the text look consistently awful. To download the new
version, please visit the TagCanvas page.
JPEG Saver 4.3
As if to prove that I haven't given up on JPEG Saver, here's another new version. This time I've added a transition preview window that appears when you click the big button next to the transitions list.
It transitions back and forth between two embedded JPEG images that I created with Blender, so now you won't have to rely on guessing which transition each name refers to. Maybe I'll remember what they all mean now too.
There are a couple of new transitions as well, including an updated "bar slide" from the 3.x version. The new installer is available from the downloads page.
JPEG Saver 4.2.2
This version of JPEG Saver fixes a bug in the "image folder" background mode. Somehow I managed to forget that the image lists use a database now, so it was crashing when it didn't have a database file selected. Oops. I've also added another transition and updated the PNG, CMS and SQLite libraries in this version.
Updated installer: downloads page.
SVGGraph 2.5
There are no new graph types in this new version of SVGGraph, but there are quite a few changes. I've added three more marker symbols for line and scatter graphs ('cross', 'x', and 'pentagon'), an option for setting a line dash pattern for line graphs, line width options for non-line graphs (line graphs already had an option for this) and more of the line graph options support using arrays to provide the multi-line graph with different settings for each line.
One of the bigger changes is to the Javascript code. Instead of using
inline event handlers (onmouseover, onmouseout,
etc.) I have changed to using addEventListener from a
function called when the SVG is loaded. All the parameters that would
be passed to the functions in the onmouseover handler are
now stored in Javascript variables at the start of the SVG file.
This separation of the events can produce a much more compact SVG file.
A scatter graph with a large number of data points and tooltips enabled
could be 40% smaller using the new event handler method. Unfortunately,
the Adobe plugin for Internet Explorer does not support
addEventListener, so if you want to keep tooltips working
in IE you will have to fall back to using the old method - there's an
option for that called compat_events.
TagCanvas 1.9
This version of TagCanvas mainly addresses compatibility with Internet Explorer versions 6-8 when using image tags. Unfortunately, the txtOpt mode still will not work with these browsers, but if you want to use image links then at least they will work now.
I've also added a modified version of Explorer Canvas to the downloads section of the TagCanvas page - this is to support the fading of image tags with distance, which the standard version of excanvas.js will not do.
For more details and download links, visit the TagCanvas page.