News archive
Snow
Just in case you don't have snow falling outside your window, I've made a simple Javascript file that adds falling snow to a page. It uses the canvas element which means that its performance varies between browsers a bit, but it's just a bit of fun. Take a look at the snow page to see it in action.
TagCanvas 1.4.2
This is a very minor update to TagCanvas, changing a couple of functions to support the Internet Explorer 9 beta's updated way of handling events. The tag animation sometimes locks up completely, but I'll put that down to IE9 still being in beta - hopefully the finished product will have ironed out that kind of thing.
I've been pleasantly surprised by IE9. Not only does it support the canvas element, but SVG is now handled by the browser without the need for a plugin.
The updated stand alone and jQuery plugin files are available from the TagCanvas page.
Windows 7 first impressions
I finally got around to installing Windows 7 on my PC, having skipped over Vista altogether. It was quite interesting, so I thought I would share my experiences here.
First, a bit of background. I have been installing operating systems on various computers for a long time - from Amiga OS to MS-DOS, Windows 95, 98, NT, 2000, XP, Mac OS X, various Linux distributions and many different versions of FreeBSD. Installing a new OS for the first time still makes me quite nervous though, as I do not know if anything is likely to go wrong.
My hardware is an Intel Core 2 Duo with 2GB of DDR2 memory and a 256MB NVIDIA GeForce 7300GT graphics card driving two monitors, one a DVI-connected ViewSonic and the other an analogue Daewoo using a VGA connector. I added a spare 160GB hard drive that I had lying around to install the new OS on, splitting it into two partitions.
TagCanvas 1.4.1
I hadn't noticed until yesterday (when it was pointed out to me) that right-clicks on the links in TagCanvas would trigger the link as well as popping up the browser context menu. That's a bug!
I've fixed it so that only left-clicks will trigger the links. This is about the only difference in this version of TagCanvas, apart from links being triggered on mouse up instead of mouse down to work more like a real link click.
You can get the updated stand alone and jQuery plugin versions from the TagCanvas page. The jQuery plugins site appears to be allowing submissions again now, so I'll upload the new version there soon too.
JPEG Saver 4.1
It has taken me a while longer than I had hoped, and it's not the same as I had expected, but JPEG Saver 4.1 is finally here. The most noticable change will be the "File" menu - you can now save and load different config files. People have been asking me for this for years, so I'm happy to have got around to it.
The next change, which is more significant but less obvious, is that this version is the first to use an SQLite database to store the lists of images and folders. This replaces the cache file and the memory- based image list that older versions used. It will allow me to add some more interesting features in the future, but for now it has made it easy for me to add three new change modes, Shuffled/Sequential, Shuffled/Shuffled and Chronological.
The final big change is that this version supports Unicode throughout. This means that anyone not using the Latin alphabet should be able to use JPEG Saver much more easily, assuming they can understand all the options on the dialog. The config file is now stored as UTF-8 to make this work while still being backwards compatible.