News archive

SVGGraph 2.2.1

Just a quick bugfix release this time - SVGGraph 2.2.1 now supports graphs with a single data point, which will display as a single bar or an entire pie. The line graph types will not display anything, since you can't draw a line with only one point.

I am quite surprised I had not spotted this bug before, but I have now added it to my test plan so hopefully it will not be coming back. The updated version is available from the downloads page.

Coming soon will be a new, optimised version of TagCanvas, but probably before that will be a slightly-updated JPEG Saver to sort out some installer problems on 64-bit Vista.

JPEG Saver 4.2

In this update, JPEG Saver gets a CMS! Before you start wondering why JPEG Saver needs a content management system I should point out that in this case CMS stands for Colour Management System - I have added in the Little CMS library to support loading of colour profiles from images and files.

Other changes in this version include two new transitions called Waves and Polka Dot, the return of the Depixelize transition that was in the 3.x versions, some changes to the database code and some EXIF field output tweaks.

This version should also start up and shut down more cleanly, using a window covering the screen instead of a full-screen exclusive mode. It will, however, fall back to using the old method if you change the display mode or turn on gamma adjustment, both of which require exclusive mode. Go to the downloads page for the installer.

SVGGraph 2.2

This is quite a big update to SVGGraph, changing the way axes are calculated and adding in support for negative numbers on the bar and line graphs. I've also enabled tooltips for all graph types, with new rounded corner and shadow options.

The other visible change is that I have added background image support for all graph types. The different options are a bit tricky to explain in words, so I've made a new page to demonstrate the options: SVGGraph background image support.

You can view the details of these changes on the SVGGraph page and download the latest version from there. As I said before, a lot has changed in this version so there may be bugs that I didn't find - if you find one, please let me know and I'll do my best to fix it.

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).