News archive
JPEG Saver 4.9.1
This new version of JPEG Saver is just a quick bug fix - version 4.9 has a simple error in it that I missed during testing, which meant items other than logo items failed to validate with a nonsensical error message and the end result that you could not add them.
There is one other fix in this version - I found that occasionally the JPEG Saver process would fail to exit if you tried to quit while a transition was in progress, due to waiting on an event that had been cancelled. Unlike most concert-goers, processes will happily wait forever for events to happen without getting bored and wandering off to the nearest pub.
The updated installer is available from the downloads page.
TagCanvas 2.2
The new version of TagCanvas adds two functions for rotating the cloud and a couple of extra options.
The new functions are demonstrated by the first two buttons under the example
canvas above. TagToFront rotates the cloud so that the desired tag
is at the front of the cloud. RotateTag rotates the cloud so that
the tag is wherever you want it to be - the position is specified using a
longitude and latitude. This example always rotates a tag to the same position,
though it is quite tricky to figure out where. If you can't figure out where the
tags are going, highlight this spoiler text:
latitude -30, longitude 90, which
is on the right and below the middle.
The choice of which tag to move can be specified using its id (the id attribute
of the <a> element) or the text inside it, or by using an
index into TagCanvas' array of tags. The last option is most useful when you
want to pick a random tag because the order in the array might not match the
original order of the tags on the page.
JPEG Saver 4.9
The biggest change in this version of JPEG Saver is the addition of support for loading files in the WebP image format. In case you haven't heard of it before, it's a bit like the JPEG format in that it supports lossy compression, and a bit like PNG in that it also supports lossless compression and alpha channels.
Loading WebP images is supported for the main image, background images and logo items (with alpha channel transparency). The WebP format supports EXIF and other metadata, but I have not yet attempted to add support for loading it into JPEG Saver. Expect this to work in a future version.
Other changes in this version are an extra slider in the logo item dialog for setting an alpha blending value, an extra checkbox on the background tab for maintaining the aspect ratio of images when scaled to fit the screen, and four new transitions: “Doors”, “Wall tiles”, “Fold” and “Unfold”.
SVGGraph 2.12
The new version of SVGGraph doesn't contain any really big changes, but it does have several new options for how the graphs should look. I've tried to illustrate most of the new options on the example graph below.
Unless you are profoundly colour-blind, the most obvious new feature on this
graph should be the addition of green stripes - this is enabled with the
grid_back_stripe option and the colour can be set using
grid_back_stripe_colour. The stripes are drawn from the major grid
lines on the Y-axis.
The next change is on the Y-axis, where it is using a logarithmic scale. This is
enabled with the log_axis_y option, and the base for the logarithm
can be set using log_axis_y_base. I've added some extra documentation
about using the log scale on the axis
and grid options page.
TagCanvas 2.1.2
A small update to TagCanvas this time, all it does is scale the cursor position in browser or screen pixels to match the pixels in the canvas. That doesn't sound very interesting, but it means that using CSS to change the size of the canvas will no longer mean that the mouse doesn't select the tags properly.
This does not mean that you can use CSS to set the canvas size without using the
canvas element's width and height attributes - they
are still required to set up the size of the canvas in pixels. If you use CSS to
change the size of a canvas, it will use the width and height given by these
attributes internally.
This means that increasing the size of a canvas using CSS is likely to cause aliasing, so try to set the width and height attributes as close to the actual size as possible or it might not look very good.