News archive
JPEG Saver 5.15
My JPEG Saver to-do list could be roughly divided into 1: big complicated things; 2: small fiddly things; and 3: transitions. Version 5.15 doesn't have any new big complicated things in it, but the others are present.
Useful things
First up is something that I only just realised would be useful, but for some reason I had never even thought of it before. The JPEG Saver config dialog now has a taskbar entry when it is not opened from the Control Panel. The reason I added this is that I kept finding myself opening config dialogs and losing them behind other windows, which got a bit annoying.
The other useful thing I have added is in the item editor dialog. The list
of formatting tokens can be very long, and the tokens by themselves are fairly
meaningless, so now when you position the cursor in e.g. %xX in the
format edit box the token list will scroll to and select the %xX
token. (The example is “Exposure time” in the image info item.) There
is a checkbox at the top of the tokens list if you want to turn it off.
SVGGraph 3.9
This new version of SVGGraph adds some axis, legend and grid options, and
some small updates to the shape option.
Tick, tick, ticking in my head
I haven't tried to cram all the new options into the example below, but the
most important change is probably the addition of the axis_ticks_x
and axis_ticks_y options. Both of these options are used in the
example graph, explicitly setting the positions of the X and Y axis markings.
The graph shows box office revenue of the Marvel films to date, though I don't know how accurate the numbers are (I found them on a website after a quick search). The X axis ticks are placed on the release dates of the first Iron Man film and all the Avengers films. The Y axis ticks are just spread evenly with a couple of extra ticks for top and bottom values.
JPEG Saver 5.14
Here is another entry into the "most boring release" contest. Having said that, the changes in this version are quite important and have been on my to-do list for quite a while.
Moving real-time items
The whole point of a screensaver is to prevent damage to the screen by the same pattern of pixels being displayed over a long period of time. Until now JPEG Saver's real-time items have sat in one place on the screen, probably not changing much. If you have the date shown as a real-time item, it will sit there not changing until midnight - and then it doesn't even turn into a pumpkin.
So now the real-time items have a new motion option next to the position and offset options. This allows you to choose how the item moves around the screen, how fast, and how long it pauses at each screen edge. It actually moves around in an invisible box defined by the position and offset options, but unless your position is relative to the image or your offset is huge it should be somewhere near the screen edges.
TrayBlank 1.11
TrayBlank 1.11 is here because someone had a really good idea. As usual, it wasn't me. Anyway, the suggestion I received was for TrayBlank to turn off selected monitors, leaving others on.
The monitor list menu
If you have more than one monitor TrayBlank will now display a new sub-menu where you can choose which monitors are turned off by the “Turn off monitor” menu item (and its hotkey). If you don't have more than one monitor then this version will just seem a bit bigger for no reason.
The menu will always start with an “All monitors” option, which makes the turn-off-monitor command behave the way it has always done in the past. Underneath it there should be a list of all the monitors TrayBlank finds attached to your system. With a bit of luck it will contain actual monitor model numbers, but otherwise it will call them “Monitor 1”, “Monitor 2”, etc.
TagCanvas 2.10
It has been over five years since I released the last version of TagCanvas. That's mainly because I didn't have anything useful to do with it - I had a few suggestions from users that were either very unlikely to be useful to anyone else, or were somewhere between impractical and impossible to implement.
I wonder how you're feeling
That changed recently when someone suggested making the tags emit a sound when the mouse hovers over them. That sounded like a really good idea to me. I don't think anyone has asked for it before, and if they have then I'm sorry it has taken me this long to get around to it. (Though there are things on my to-do lists for other projects that have been hanging around for longer.)
So that's what this version is all about. The example below uses a few .ogg files from the Motion Monkey Free Retro Arcade Sounds Pack to demonstrate the two ways that TagCanvas 2.10 supports playing sounds.