Marc Gregoire’s Blog

In March 2009, my brother and me went to Miami on holiday.
I had already posted some pictures on my blog in the “Back from Miami, Steak and Whiskey” and “Holiday in Miami ” posts.
We now have uploaded a lot more pictures. See them here. Enjoy

Finally, Wallpaper Cycler 3.6.0.180 has been released today

Wallpaper Cycler 3.6.0.180 has a lot of new features and bug-fixes. Some of the major new features include:

• Full High DPI support.
• Support for Windows 7.
• Support for 64 bit Windows.
• Automatically rotate JPEG images based on camera orientation.
• Option to manually rotate individual wallpapers.
• Automatically assign a default tag to new wallpapers.
• Option to automatically rerender the wallpaper on resuming from standby or hibernate.
• New option “Cycle wallpaper when display settings changed”.
• Folder synchronization will detect new folders.
• More advanced Preview Window.
• New Wallpaper Cycler Controller tool.
• New Info Panel replaces the old Information Bar.
• Align images inside wallpaper objects on layouts.
• Layout objects now have an option ‘visible’.
• High color toolbar images and menu images.
• Multithreaded rendering.
• New HTML renderer for text objects in layouts.
• Option to generate only sensible aspect ratio tags.
• Layout changes in the editor can now be discarded.

Get a full list of all the changes.

A few pictures from my city trip to Prague in the Czech Republic. The last picture is taken in Kutná Hora, a small town near Prague and a UNESCO World Heritage site.

(Note: all pictures are copyrighted by me, Marc Gregoire. Please contact me if you want to use one.)

The following new features have been implemented in Wallpaper Cycler:

• The text editors now have an extra button to insert a line break without a visible horizontal line.
• The Info Panel now contains a “Set As Wallpaper” button in the upper right corner to make it easier to render the selected wallpaper to the desktop.
• Wallpaper Cycler will now by default store the rendered wallpaper in “C:\Users\<username>\AppData\Roaming\NuonSoft\WallpaperCycler” or similar depending on the language of your Windows and whether you are running XP, Vista or Windows 7. Previously WPC would store the image in the user temp folder, but some tools cleanup the temp folder causing a plain colored background to appear on the next reboot of Windows.
• An “Options…” menu item in the Wallpaper Cycler notification icon menu.
• The fullscreen preview now shows a ‘(Image x of y)’ in the lower left wallpaper information block.

I made the following bug fixes for Wallpaper Cycler:

• libexif.dll would sometimes crash with certain jpg files.
• The yellow error message that appeared in the screensaver when WPC was not running was not moving around the screen anymore.
• When folder synchronization adds new folders (= new categories) to disabled categories, the new categories are also disabled.
• Rerendering of the wallpaper in the Lite version of Wallpaper Cycler would not always happen in a low priority thread.
• When all categories were disabled, the “Start Cycling” button would be disabled, now it’s enabled and a warning will be shown when you press it to explain why cycling cannot start.
• When a cycle was skipped due to CPU usage (when CPU monitoring is enabled), the timer would freeze.
• Screensaver didn’t work on some systems.
• When cycling to the next file based wallpaper, WPC will first check if the file still exist. If it doesn’t exist it will automatically cycle again. It will try this for 10 times after which an error message is shown with a suggestion on how to cleanup the list.
• When the WPC screensaver was enabled, opening the Windows Screensaver control panel was pretty slow.
• WPC will remember the old screensaver and when disabling the WPC screensaver it will restore this old screensaver. Previously, it also happened that WPC would remove any screensaver that was configured in Windows, this should also not happen anymore.
• The option regarding hand-cursors in Options > Program Settings > Desktop has been rewritten a bit to make it more clear what is meant.
• In the startup settings delay times for <Rerender on startup delay> and <Delay load last WCL at startup> now clearly mention that those are in seconds.
• The words “tray icon” and “system tray” have been changed to descriptions based on “notification area” according to the Windows UI guidelines.
• The main window could be resized too small when running in very high DPI (150%).
• “error while create DIBSection in CWCL::RenderWallpaperWithLayout” appeared when Windows was waiting on the Switch User screen and WPC wanted to cycle the wallpaper.
• After returning from screensaver or locked desktop, the timer of Wallpaper Cycler sometimes didn’t count down anymore.
• Windows Gadget was not displaying correctly on Windows 7.
• Height of new tray icon has been increased with 1 pixel.
• The hotspots in the Info Panel kept working even when no wallpaper was selected in the main list.
• When you have a ‘Give Tags’ hotkey assigned to open the tags menu for the selected wallpapers, it will now show a thumbnail in the menu when only 1 wallpaper is selected. This also works in the fullscreen preview window.
• When the Give Tags menu opened, the main window or fullscreen preview doesn’t lose focus anymore.

I’m also happy to announce that I’m currently working on updating the website and preparing for finally releasing the 3.6 release