News archive
TagCanvas 1.6.1
This latest version of TagCanvas is mostly a bugfix release - the
hideTags option wasn't working in the jQuery version, so I've
fixed that. I've also started looking at the performance of various aspects
of TagCanvas, running it through the profilers in Chrome and IE8 and
changing a few things here and there. I don't think it has made much
difference so far, but I intend to take a longer look at it after I've
finished with my changes to SVGGraph.
Follow the TagCanvas link to find the updated files.
More snow
I was reading through some web pages over the weekend that suggested ways of improving the performance of Javascript when doing things with HTML5 canvas-based applications. I was using the snow script to try them out on, with a slight modification to allow me to use it for benchmarking. Some of the changes made measureable improvements, but the one change that made the greatest improvement was not on the list - probably because it is blatantly obvious: don't copy more of an image than you need!
My snowflake is created on an offscreen canvas and then copied to the canvas that sits behind the main page. The snowflake itself only takes up 40x40 pixels, but I had set the size of the canvas to 400x400 pixels. Every time the snowflake was being drawn over 150,000 useless blank pixels were being checked to see if they contained anything to be copied to the main canvas. Reducing the size of the snowflake canvas to 40x40 pixels improved things significantly.
The updated script is on the snow page - the bookmarklet link has not changed, so if you are using that you should find the new script is picked up straight away (or when the old script expires from your browser cache).
TagCanvas 1.6
Yes, another version of TagCanvas just a week after the last one. This time I've added some important and useful features, so I can recommend trying it out. The new files are on the TagCanvas page, as usual.
The biggest change in this version is the new "weighted" mode. Tag clouds usually weight the tags somehow to show which are the most popular tags, or the most widely used. TagCanvas can now use the size of the text in the tag cloud to apply a weight to each tag, and display it by font size, colour or both.
I've added a new TagCanvas with weighted tags page to show how it works and how to use it.
TagCanvas 1.5
This new version of TagCanvas doesn't have any new options or features to get excited about, but there have been some quite large internal changes to allow multiple instances to run on a page.
If you only want to run one cloud on a page, then this update will not make a lot of difference. Updated files are on the TagCanvas page.
SVGGraph 2.1
I have updated SVGGraph with three new graph types: StackedBarGraph, GroupedBarGraph and MultiLineGraph. To make it a bit easier to see how each type of graph works I've split the SVGGraph page up - details of the new graph types are on the bar graphs and line and scatter graphs pages.