News archive
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.
JPEG Saver 4.3.1
This is a minor update to JPEG Saver, fixing the sequential mode so that it remains sequential after new files are added to a folder. The order of the sequence used is not the same as the order that Windows lists files in, so I might take another look at this in a future version.
This version also comes with an updated installer, which STRONGLY RECOMMENDS that you choose the option to install the config files in your user profile instead of keeping them with the screensaver file. This is to prevent file permissions issues from preventing writing to the database, which causes JPEG Saver to appear to not find files. It should now also install your config files as the user that runs the installer instead of as the admin user.
The new and slightly improved installer is available from the downloads page.
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.