News archive
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.
JPEG Saver 4.4.1
A bugfix release for JPEG Saver, this one fixes a bug where the 'e' key option to find and select the current file in Explorer would only work if you had a "Now Playing" item enabled.
Yes, it's a weird bug, but it makes sense. The function to go to a file in Explorer is called "SHOpenFolderAndSelectItems", which requires that "CoInitialize" is called first to set up COM. Up until now it was only being called in the class that reads the current track title from iTunes, which is why the "Now Playing" item was required.
The new version is available from the downloads page.
TagCanvas 1.11.1 jQuery plugin update
This is a quick bugfix in the jQuery plugin version of TagCanvas -
the default interval value was not being used, which
meant animation didn't start at all in Internet Explorer and went
too fast in other browsers.
I've also updated the TagCanvas page with some slightly improved documentation, including full example code for pages using the stand-alone and jQuery plugin versions of the script.
TagCanvas 1.11
I've updated TagCanvas with a couple of new and interesting options.
People have been asking me for a while if they can have a different
shaped cloud to the usual sphere, so now there is the option to have a
cylinder shape instead. There are actually two shape
options, one for a cylinder that starts off aligned along the x-axis,
and one aligned along the y-axis.
The reason for the initial alignment options becomes clear when
used in conjunction with one of the other new options: lock.
You can use this to lock rotation around either the x or y axis, to
keep the cylinder aligned - though you can set it to x or y for any
of the shapes.
The final new feature is zooming of the cloud in response to the mouse wheel (or scroll gesture on a touchpad). This is on by default, but there are a few new options to control it or turn it off completely. The updated files are available from the TagCanvas page.
JPEG Saver 4.4
The new version of JPEG Saver adds a feature that I've been hoping to add for a while now - filtering the list of images. Now that the file details are stored in a database it is fairly straightforward to limit the list of images display by their size, age, and by the file name and path.
The new filters dialog is available on the Folders tab, where there is now a "Filters..." button. Pressing this will present you with the dialog shown here:
You can set up quite complex conditions using this dialog. The "exclude" option that was available in the config file to filter out directories in previous versions has been removed, as you can now achieve this using the filter rules.