News archive
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.
JPEG Saver 5.13
This new version of JPEG Saver is another that doesn't look very interesting, but it does contain some important changes.
Automatic database updates
The desktop helper now has a menu labelled “Update automatically”, where you can enable this new feature and choose how often it updates. I've been using it for several weeks set to 6-hourly updates without noticing any problems (or noticing it at all to be honest) so I'm confident it doesn't do any harm.
SVGGraph 3.8
SVGGraph 3.8 is another release focussed on small improvements. There are two new graph types though, since someone asked how to display a stepped line graph and I didn't have an easy answer.
Stepped line graphs
I don't think anyone has ever asked for this before, but it was very easy to
add. The two new graph types are SteppedLineGraph and
MultiSteppedLineGraph. They behave exactly the same as normal line
graphs, but the line progresses in steps instead of straight lines between the
data points.
The best-fit lines follow the same path as on normal line graphs, based on the position of the markers. All of the usual line graph options are available, though there is no stacked version of the graph because it looked very strange when I tried it out. If you really want a stacked, stepped line graph I can add it quite easily, just contact me at the usual address.