News archive
JPEG Saver 5.4
JPEG Saver 5.4 is one of those versions where I've changed a lot, but it doesn't look like I've done much at all. Apart from the updated version number, there is one place where the changes should be visible to everyone: the transition preview window.
In earlier versions the transition preview was a 160×120 window that demonstrated the selected transition in the main tab of the config dialog. The major changes in this version made it difficult to keep it there, so I've doubled the size of the preview and moved it out into a popup window.
Those "major changes" I mentioned are actually only updates to make the configuration dialog support scaling - the type of scaling you get from the scaling display settings in the Control Panel. If you have a high-DPI screen your scaling might be set to 125%, 150% or 175% (or you can set it to your own value, just to make things even more tricky). Windows has supported these high-DPI options for quite a while now, but it is only recently that Windows 10 added some handy support functions that made it a bit easier for me to get things working without completely redoing the dialogs.
SVGGraph 3.1
SVGGraph 3.1 adds a few new things, the most significant being support for
subgraphs, something that should make the EmptyGraph a bit more
useful.
Subgraphs
Subgraphs are basically entire graphs drawn on top of a parent graph. They can inherit the parent graph's settings, or have their own settings. Likewise, they can inherit the colours or have their own colour set. They don't inherit data values or lists of links though, because each graph can deal with its data in very different ways.
JPEG Saver 5.3
JPEG Saver 5.3 is a strange update, adding something I really didn't want to do. For several years various JPEG Saver functions haven't worked well, and it was all down to a change that Microsoft made to how screensavers work. This is going to take some explanation.
The problem
The whole reason JPEG Saver has been having trouble is a change Microsoft made in about Windows 8 that meant Windows now starts a screensaver on its own desktop. I suspect the reason behind this is security related, but it doesn't provide a lot of protection as far as I can tell. The screensaver still has access to all the user's files, but it can't directly interact with the main desktop display.
Whatever the reason for the change, it broke all the JPEG Saver features that did want to interact with the main desktop:
SVGGraph 3.0.1
SVGGraph 3.0.1 is a bugfix release, but there are a lot of changes in it. Sometimes you just have to rip up the floorboards to kill that annoying insect.*
2,75px s'il vous plaît
The bug that caused all these changes is a very simple one: PHP automatically converts numbers to strings using its current locale. This makes perfect sense, but it meant that running SVGGraph in a locale that uses a comma instead of a full-stop for the decimal separator produced garbled SVG output. SVG always uses a full-stop for its decimal separator, with commas or spaces used for separating values.
SVGGraph 3.0
In my last news item I said I was going to work on version 3.0 of SVGGraph next, and that is what I have been doing. There is a lot more I want to do, but I could have spent months tinkering on the new version without ever being completely happy with it. So here it is.
The example EmptyGraph above is something that I thought might be useful, and will become more useful when something else I have planned comes to fruition. At the moment it can be used to draw shapes and labels, plus it supports the graph title, border and background options. You can assign values, colours and links, but it doesn't do anything with them and you can get away with code as simple as this:
require 'SVGGraph/autoloader.php';
$graph = new Goat1000\SVGGraph\SVGGraph(600, 300);
$graph->render('EmptyGraph');