Marc Gregoire’s Blog

The following new features have been implemented in Wallpaper Cycler:

• JPEG files will now automatically be rotated and mirrored according to the orientation stored in the EXIF data.
• You can now enable an option called “Only generate sensible aspect ratios” for the “Automatically assign “Aspect Ratio x:y” tag” feature. This will prevent generation of tags like “Aspect Ratio 123:36″. It will now only generate aspect ratio tags with components <= 16 for example “Aspect Ratio 16:9″, “Aspect Ratio 5:3″.
• When using the “Quick Move” and “Give Tags” hotkey for the current wallpaper on the desktop, the OSD will now show a small preview of the image that will be manipulated.
• You can now choose between recursive/non-recursive selection of a wallpaper in a wallpaper layout object when that object is set to RandomFromSameCategory or RandomFromFixedCategory.
• When using the left/right keys in the fullscreen preview to preview the previous/next wallpaper, this is immediately reflected in the main window so that the feature “Give Tags” hotkey works correctly when browsing images in the fullscreen preview.
• Fullscreen preview: enter will now render the previewed wallpaper to the desktop.
• When closing the layout editor, WPC will now ask to save the changes or discard them. At the moment however, this is asked everytime the layout editor is closed even if nothing has changed in the layout.

I also made the following bug fixes for Wallpaper Cycler:

• When the screensaver was configured to use all available layouts, it would even select layouts in disabled categories. Disabled layout categories are now properly skipped unless you force the screensaver module to use a disabled layout category.
• Drag & drop of multiple wallpapers to a different category wasn’t working.
• When hitting the cancel button in the “select layout template” dialog, the creation of the layout is cancelled and the layout editor is closed.
• “highlight current wallpaper” didn’t work anymore. This also caused problems that WPC would rerender the wrong wallpaper when you hit Rerender wallpaper.
• Sometimes when adding a folder recursively to an existing category it would add all current child categories twice, closing the main window and reopening fixed this issue. This is now fixed, they shouldn’t appear twice anymore.

NuonSoft has released a patch to fix a stability issue with Wallpaper Cycler 3.5.0.97 on Windows Vista.
The patch is 176 KB.
More information can be found at:
http://www.nuonsoft.com/wallpapercycler/vista_patch.php

If you encounter any problems, don’t hesitate to contact NuonSoft Support

Quite a few people are experiencing issues with running Wallpaper Cycler under Vista. I’ve tracked it down to the bar on the right of the main window resembling a Windows XP taskpane. Because of all the reported issues, I decided to get rid of that taskpane completely and replace it by an Info Panel at the bottom of the window. The following image is a concept drawing of what I have in mind.

Hopefully this move will make Wallpaper Cycler stable on Windows Vista.

Due to some extended business trips and the fact that I will have my yearly holiday in August (finally ), my development on NuonSoft products has been temporarily suspended until September. In September or October, I hope to finalize the new build of Wallpaper Cycler.

Today I’m pleased to announce that Beta 1 of NuonSoft Wallpaper Cycler 3.6 is currently in the hands of our beta testers.

This beta version contains the following changes. Read the rest of this entry »

The following new features have been implemented in Wallpaper Cycler:

• New functionality added to the image preview window, the window that appears when you press the spacebar when an image is selected in the main window of Wallpaper Cycler:
  • The preview window now allows you to use the left and right keys to move through the images in that category or search folder.
  • A small (optional) help text is displayed in the preview window.
  • Information of the image being previewed can optionally be shown on the preview.
• The tray menu now contains a “Tools > Find Non-Existing Wallpapers…” item.
• When a new update has been downloaded, WPC will now ask you if you want to run it immediately.
• The “Check for updates” feature will now calculate a checksum of the downloaded file to see if it was downloaded correctly.
• Text objects in layouts can now be linked to a wallpaper object in your layout. This allows you to use the %wallpapername% and other commands to display information about the wallpaper being shown in the linked wallpaper object.

I also made the following bug fixes for Wallpaper Cycler:

• The tree on the left of the main window was recreated every time you changed/added/deleted a category resulting in quite anoying visual flickering. This has been fixed now and the tree almost never flickers anymore.
• When running the trial version, when starting a new WCL file and then exiting Wallpaper Cycler, no question was asked whether to save the file or not.
• Increased the contrast a little bit of the Wallpaper Cycler Vista gadget.
• The Wallpaper Cycler Vista gadget didn’t display correctly when Vista was running in high DPI mode.

The following new features have been implemented in Wallpaper Cycler:

• New option to disable word wrapping for notes in calender notes objects.
• Some Open/Save dialogs now have the true Vista layout when running on Windows Vista.

I also made the following bug fixes for Wallpaper Cycler:

• WPC crashed when loading BMP files that where compressed with for example RLE8 compression.
• By default WPC will no longer make a sound when cycling or when CPU Load is too high to cycle. Of course this can be enabled again in File > Document Properties.
• The screensaver will now wait until the transition effect is finished before starting the timer for the next image.
• The “Circles Out” screensaver transition effect didn’t always completely covered the screen depending on your resolution.
• Wallpaper Cycler didn’t always start automatically when logging in to Windows and autostart was enabled.
• Cycle-at-times would not check exactly at the new minute when resuming from standy or hibernation.
• Fixed some problems with the cycle-at-time feature especially in combination with hibernation.
• You could press the “Delete” key on your keyboard to delete the “My Layouts” category which would crash WPC.

A new iteration of the Wallpaper Cycler development has started.

The following new features have been implemented in Wallpaper Cycler:

• When a layout doesn’t contain a wallpaper object with the “Which Wallpaper” property set to “Auto” a warning will be shown. This is done because in that case certain aspects of WPC will not work as expected. Double clicking a wallpaper in the main window for example will actually NOT show that wallpaper on your desktop because that’s the “Auto” wallpaper.
• A new option in Tools > Program Settings > Global > Startup called “Delay load last WCL at startup”. This allows you to specify a delay in seconds before Wallpaper Cycler will reload the last WCL file at startup.
• You can now make a printout of your calendar notes.
• %wallpaperfullname% can be used in text objects on layouts to display the full pathname + extension of a wallpaper and not only the filename part like %wallpapername% does.

I also made the following bug fixes for Wallpaper Cycler:

• When using “Random from fixed category” for a wallpaper object in a layout, WPC will now recursively select a wallpaper from the selected fixed category.
• Some configurations of wallpaper objects in layouts didn’t take disabled tags into account.
• The “Quick Disable” feature now properly checks all wallpapers currently on the desktop to determine if it needs to cycle when disabling a category or tag.
• WPC would crash with truncated BMP files. Most photo editing programs are also unable to load those, however, now WPC loads them without a problem, at least when they are not too damaged.
• The Vista gadget didn’t install on Vista 64 bit in the correct folder.
• You were unable to specify “-1″ for the “Days After Current Day” in layouts > Calendar Notes Object > Edit Calendar Notes > General

After a long development cycle and 2 beta phases, today I can proudly announce that Wallpaper Cycler 3.5.0.97 has gone gold.
Wallpaper Cycler 3.5.0.97 has a lot of new features and bug-fixes. Some of the major new features include:

• Tag support: assign tags to wallpapers, layouts and/or categories.
• Search Folders to get a different view on your wallpapers.
• Smart Orientation for portrait/landscape monitors.
• Faster thumbnail generation.
• Installation possible without being administrator.
• Wizard to guide you with certain actions.
• Windows Vista Gadget to control Wallpaper Cycler.
• “Quick Disable” hotkeys to quickly disable categories/tags.
• Slideshow Mode.
• Statistics.
• …

Learn more about Wallpaper Cycler 3.5.0.97.

I made the following bug fixes for Wallpaper Cycler in response to the Beta testers:

• The thumbnail file is not kept open all the time anymore, so backup software shouldn’t have problems with it.
• Sometimes the folder synchronization feature kicked in while rebuilding the thumbs database with the thumbnail manager.
• Folder synchronization doesn’t get stuck anymore in a loop when the WCL was saved in one of the folders that was being monitored for changes.

I’m also finalizing the Help File and the new Online Help Site and preparing for a release very soon now…

I made the following bug fixes for Wallpaper Cycler in response to the Beta testers:

• Black dot appearing in corners sometimes when using small corner rounding values for wallpaper objects with a border of a few pixels.

Also, Beta 2 of Wallpaper Cycler 3.5 is finished and is currently being beta tested by a closed group of beta-testers.

The following new features have been implemented in Wallpaper Cycler in response to the Beta testers:

• Updated AGG to 2.4.
• You can now configure the CPU monitoring threshold between 0% and 100%.

I also made the following bug fixes for Wallpaper Cycler in response to the Beta testers:

• A message is shown when cpu monitoring/time synchronization was enabled and is being disabled because you are not an administrator anymore.
• The “Day With Note Cell” configuration in the layout calendar settings now properly inherits the values from the “cells” configuration.
• In the calendar notes editor, when you edit something, close it and save & close the layout editor, the calendar notes object on the desktop is not clickable anymore. Double-clicking doesn’t do anything until the next cycle.
• Time Synchronization requires administrative privileges. Now Wallpaper Cycler will check if it has administrative privileges and if not will automatically disable all time synchronization settings. Works also with Vista UAC. + added extra note in help file to describe this.
• CPU Monitoring requires administrative privileges. Now Wallpaper Cycler will check if it has administrative privileges and if not will automatically disable all CPU Monitoring settings. Works also with Vista UAC. + added extra note in help file to describe this.
• Wallpaper Cycler would lose all its “Skip Extensions” and “Most Recent Used” items during a crash report generation.

The following new features have been implemented in Wallpaper Cycler in response to the Beta testers:

• The help is now available offline AND online. An option called “Use the online web-based help” is added to “Tools > Program Settings > Miscellaneous” that you can use to switch between online and offline help. With this, users can always consult the online help when there are compatibility issues with the offline help file, which some users experienced when running the offline help on Vista.
• New option in the layout editor to vertically and horizontally center 1 object to another object.
• You can now choose whether a “Move To Hotkeys” or a “Give Tags Hotkeys” is executed on the selected wallpapers in the main window of Wallpaper Cycler OR on the current wallpaper on the desktop.
• Cycle once a day and do not exit at windows logon

I also made the following bug fixes for Wallpaper Cycler in response to the Beta testers:

• The “Find Non-Existing Wallpapers” now also properly checks for the existence of URL wallpapers instead of skipping them.
• In the effects editor you could enter values outside the allowed range. For example, for transparency you could type 900.
• In the layout editor, editing things in the Effects dialog gave some unexpected behaviour. Suppose a wallpaper object had a transparency and you clicked the percentage box and set it to e.g. 0 and press enter to confirm. Next, when you clicked this text box again, it didn’t become editable. But despite it not being editable, if you’d enter e.g. 60 and do something else, like clicking the Merge mode box or resizing the column width, the percentage will change to show 60.
• In the righthand properties (e.g. in the layout editor), you couldn’t tab through all properties: you got stuck whenever a value (text, number) can be typed in the property because the value becomes selected when you tabbed to its attribute.
• Help file, page about Layout Editor: Calendar Notes Object contains a few “typos”, %m is displayed as %<linebreak>m. Same for %w and %W when Help window is too small.

The following new features have been implemented in Wallpaper Cycler in response to the Beta testers: 

• You can now specify multiple masks (up to 10) for a mask effect and WPC will choose one of these masks randomly.

I also made the following bug fixes for Wallpaper Cycler in response to the Beta testers:

• Pressing the first letter of a wallpaper in the thumbnail list to jump to the wallpaper didn’t work.
• After running “Manage Thumbnail Database” the wallpaper list in the main window is now automatically updated.
• Thumbnail generation was still not as fast as it could in certain cases.
• When adding an existing URL wallpaper and then deleting the image from the website, the thumbnail was not updated.
• When editing the tags via give tags hotkeys and the wallpaper is selected in WPC the tag changes are now reflected in the tag-listing in the sidebar of wpc.
• When moving a wallpaper with a move to hotkey and the WPC window is visible the wallpaper listing is now updated to reflect the changes. 
• When “Adding an URL Wallpaper” that is non-existing, WPC does not complain, it just adds the wallpaper and made it black. Instead of black, the red sign is now shown and a note “Not downloadable or not valid.”.
• Opening “Find & Replace Wallpaper…” makes the currently selected category empty. Closing the replace window shows the content again. Same with “Find Duplicate” window and for “Find Non Existing Wallpapers…”. Now, instead of removing all wallpapers, a note “temporarily hidden during find & replace” is shown.
• Suppose WPC window is visible, with a category of wallpapers visible. Now open explorer and add a wallpaper to WPC using the shellintegration. Make sure you select the category that is visible in WPC. The view within WPC is not updated once this image is added, you have to go to another category and come back before you see it.
• When the statistic window is open and WPC cycles, the stats were not updated automatically.
• Sometimes the notes rendered in the calendar notes object were clipped on the right side.
• “You can specify which of the columns should be shown in the details view by right clicking on the header in the list.” This was not working on Vista.

The following new features have been implemented in Wallpaper Cycler in response to the Beta testers:

• In the following cases Wallpaper Cycler will check for non existing fonts and give a warning when missing fonts were found:
  • Opening/importing a .WCL file.
  • Importing a Calendar Object template.
  • Importing a Calendar Notes Object template.
  • Importing a layout.
• Added the following functions to the COM interface so they can for example be used in a future Vista Gadget.
  • RerenderCurrentWallpaper()
  • NextWallpaperFromSameCat()
  • RestartCycling()
  • SetNoWallpaperOnDesktop()
  • RefreshDesktop()
  • ShowQuoteEditor()
  • ShowNotesEditor()
  • ShowCalendarNotesEditor()
  • ShowManageFeeds()
  • ShowDisplayProperties()
• New option for Calendar Notes objects: “Header Cell Weekend Day With Note” formatting.
• You can now rename items in the tree on the left of the main window by simply pressing F2 or by clicking it with the mouse a second time while it is already selected.
• Tray icon menu contains an item to open quote editor.
• Sorting in thumbnail view: A new menu item in Wallpapers > View > Sort.

I also made the following bug fixes for Wallpaper Cycler in response to the Beta testers:

• The layout template “Wallpaper with ‘paper’-border” would display incorrectly on secondary monitors.
• When browsing for a Calendar or Calendar Notes Template, WPC now automatically goes to the folder containing the installed templates.
• When you went to the Quotes Sites menu in the Quotes Editor and closed that menu without clicking any item and then closing the Quotes Editor, WPC would still open some quotes site.
• “Rerender Wallpaper” in Tools menu now has an icon.
• Vista Gadget now has 2 rows of buttons and the following new buttons are added: “Open WPC Window”, “Set No Wallpaper On Desktop” and “Rerender Wallpaper”.

• Removed the cycling sound when clicking on “Set No Wallpaper On Desktop”.
• Search Folder Edit Window: Tabbed as the Edit Category Windows. Two tabs “General” and “Search Actions”.
• When changing the RenderDesktopToFolder setting, WPC now moves the current rendered desktop to the new folder and thus deletes it from the old folder.
• The gradient banner in the settings window now has correct left and right margins on Vista.
• Sometimes the Tags-Page in the browser bar would say “Enable tags for selected wallpapers” even when a layout category was selected. This has now been renamed to “Enable tags for selected items”.
• Checked all Calendar Object templates and Calendar Notes Object templates for the correct Prog string, which should be:
          <Calendar Prog=”NuonSoft Wallpaper Cycler 3.5.0.xy”>
  or
          <CalendarNotes Prog=”NuonSoft Wallpaper Cycler 3.5.0.xy”>
  with xy some version. The string should not contain “Debug”, which was the case in most files.
• All \ characters in wallpaper and layout category names are automatically replaced by / because \ is not allowed.
• Settings > Document > Give Tags Hotkeys and Quick Disable Hotkeys -> the tags browser window now has multiple columns.
• Search Folder Command “Find Tags” settings now displays tags in multiple columns.
• Added a line in the CPU Load monitoring settings window to divide the settings in 2 logical block.
• Settings -> smart orientation -> the tag-listings has now multiple columns.
• Settings -> Document -> the “Slideshow mode” page is now also at the root.
• When selecting multiple images in the “Add Wallpaper Image” dialog, the preview now says that multiple files are selected instead of “couldn’t open image”.
• The tags-tab in wallpaper- and layout-category properties now shows the tags in multiple columns.
• When selecting “My Layouts” -> it says “no layouts defined.” -> even though there are layouts defined in the subcategories of “my layouts”. -> Changed to “No layouts defined in this category”
• Portrait rendering issue:
  • Show a portrait wallpaper with portrait layout (tag-based configured)
  • Show a non-portrait wallpaper with non-portrait layout
  • Delete non-portrait wallpaper from list
  • Hit re-render
  • Re-render functionality detects the wallpaper to re-render is no longer there and will take the previous wallpaper, but renders it with the non-portrait lay-out.
• When importing notes in the Calendar Notes Editor, exact duplicate notes are skipped during import.
• Calendar Notes Editor: The textbox is now a bit bigger by default and you can resize the textbox now.
• Calendar Notes Editor: The textbox flickers quite a bit when resizing the window.
• Select a Wallpaper Category (in for example move to hotkeys) didn’t show pluses at the root level elements.
• When disabling a category with the quick disable hotkey and the WPC window is visible, the tree is not updated to reflect the changes.
• Removed the sub-menu in Tools for the Thumbnail Database and moved the Manage Thumbnail Database directly into the Tools menu.
• The Apply button in the Tools > Program Settings window has been removed for the time being.
• Layout Category Edit Properties -> Goto “Tags”, type in a new tag and hit enter. Now try to go to the first tab. This doesn’t work here. I have to for example give focus back to the tag-list and then I can go to the first tab.
• Clicking help in “text editor”-window opens the notes editor help, not the text editor help.
• Horizontal scrollbar is shown in the following listboxes when the items are getting too width:
  • The listbox with layouts in Settings > Document > Wallpaper Default Settings.
  • The listbox with layouts when clicking on “Specify Layout” in the browser bar on the right of the main window.
  • The listbox in Wallpaper Category Settings > Layouts.
  • The listbox containing the cycle at times in Settings > Document > Wallpaper Cycling.
  • The listbox containing the layouts in Settings > Document > Screen Saver.
  • The listbox with hotkeys in Settings > Document > Give Tags Hotkeys.
  • The listbox with hotkeys in Settings > Document > Quick Disable Hotkeys.
  • The listbox with hotkeys in Settings > Document > Move To Hotkeys.
  • The wallpaper listbox in the tags-details window when multiple wallpapers are selected.
  • The “Available Effects” and “Effects” listboxes in the setup effects dialog in the layout editor.
  • The listbox containing the extensions to be skipped in Settings > Global > Skip Extensions.
  • The listbox with the RSS feeds in the Manage Feeds window.
  • The listbox in the Layout Template dialog.
  • When deleting a layout that is linked to a wallpaper category or wallpaper a Conflicts dialog is shown containing a listbox.
  • The listbox in Wallpaper Category Properties > Folder Links
  • When adding wallpapers via Shellintegration, a dialog is shown with the wallpapers that will be added. In that dialog the list of wallpapers now has a horizontal scrollbar if required.
  • The listbox in Settings > Document > Layout Cycling.
• Quotes-editor -> help-menu -> item “contents…” renamed to “More about quotes…”.
• Tags editor: When adding a new tag, a banner explains that you can use a comma to separate tags to quickly add several tags at once.
• Changed calender into calendar on a few places.
• When clicking the Move Up/Down buttons when sorting is enabled, a message is shown that moving items is not possible in that case.
• When clicking “start cycling” and “Cycle with delay”/”cycle at specific times” are both disabled, a dialog gives a warning and now has a link to go directly to the cycling settings instead of only describing the steps.
• When no “Open Image With…” Program is configured initially, WPC gives a warning message. A link is added in  this window to immediately go to the correct configuration page instead of only describing the steps.
• Some screensaver effects are terribly slow when the desktop is still visible underneath, so for rendering the first image (on Vista).

The following new features have been implemented in Wallpaper Cycler in response to the Beta testers:

• Open main window with category opened that was open the previous time.
• Enable/Disable tags + hotkeys to quickly enable/disable tags. When a tag is disabled with a hotkey and the current wallpaper on the desktop has that tag, the desktop will be cycled automatically. Wallpapers with disabled tags will not be cycled.
• A “true” default tiling setting. When adding new wallpapers, the tiling setting of those wallpapers will be set to “Default”. You can then easily change the default tiling setting in Tools > Program Settings > Document > Wallpaper Default Settings.
• WPC can now automatically assign a tag like “AspectRatio 4:3″ where the 4:3 is automatically calculated based on the added wallpaper or “AspectRatio Uneven”.

I also made the following bug fixes for Wallpaper Cycler in response to the Beta testers:

• Settings Window and Large Fonts gives a few texts that are, with the default window size, not visible.
• Spaces are trimmed from the beginning and ending of a tag.
• You could add tags containing only spaces.
• EXIF: Maximal and Minimal Aperture Canon Maker Notes were sometimes displayed with lots of zeros.
• The little preview that appears in the Add Wallpaper File dialog is much much faster now (for JPG’s)
• Clicking the “folder synchrozing”-balloon didn’t open the result window on top. I had to click it in the windows task bar to actually see it.
• NAS and Folder Links results in reproducable crash.
• Notes-object Text Editor -> using any of the toolbar buttons will not be undoable.
• Doubleclicking the calendar notes object on the desktop opens the edit window. However, double-clicking the object again (while the first edit window is still open AND the WPC Main window is also open) opens a second edit window.
• “Did You know Window” -> there are several tips where the link to the help-file wasn’t working.
• When you hit left while the first wallpaper is rendering in the screensaver, it “goes back” but seeing as there is no previous wallpaper the screen becomes black… -> disabled left-key for first wallpaper.
• Cycle At Times -> Add -> timestamps 1 minutes -> ok -> ok. Next cycle was in 24 hours instead of 1 minute.
• Added filename of currently opened WCL-list in “settings”-window behind “document” settings entry.
• Added a note to the Calender Notes editor to explain that those notes will be used by both the “Calendar” and “Calendar Notes” objects in layouts. This note is also a link to the helpfile with more details.
• The “Find Wallpaper…”-window had no banner
• Made the minimum width/height of layout-editor bigger.
• On the “Find Non Existing Images” results-window, the helpbutton goes to the wrong topic.
• The statistic Window should not have “ok/cancel” buttons, only a “Close” button.
• If you disable “Cycle with delay” and “Cycle at specific times” and WPC is currently cycling, WPC should stop cycling.
• On the “Current WCL Statistic” page, “20 most used wallpapers” is now selected by default.
• Helpfile: EXIF DATA page -> clicking on the link to sourceforge tries to open sourceforge within the same window. -> All external links now open with an external IE window.
• Calendar Notes Editor: Select a day in the second or third month displayed and the view will jump so the month in which you clicked becomes the first displayed. -> Fixed, however, when you click a day in the right part of the window, the left part will still jump so that the current month becomes the first month in that list (this is by design).
• Reduced volume of standard cycling sound.
• Main WPC Wizard: Change ‘Cancel’ to ‘Close’. Categories etc added through it are not undone when you hit ‘Cancel’.
• “Click here to assign tags to this category”: Make the quick-add-tag textbox active by default, so you can start typing immediately.
• “Previous Wallpaper” does not select the new wallpaper like “Next Wallpaper” does.
• Let’s say the category changes at 6:00pm (old ends @5:59) and the wallpaper is also set to change at 18:00:00, it chooses an wallpaper from the old category (it seems to switch the wall before it switches the cat). since the seconds for the fixed times cant be changed there is no easy workaround. -> WPC will now force a category time limit check before each cycle.
• When importing files recursively, the error message that might appear referenced Tools > Options and it should be Tools > Program Settings.

Today I’m pleased to announce the starting of the closed Beta test phase for NuonSoft Wallpaper Cycler 3.5.

Some of the major new features include:

• Tag support.
• Search folders.
• Faster thumbnail generation (3-4 times faster).
• Faster saving of huge lists.
• Vista support.
• All the features and bug fixes posted in this blog.
• And much more …

The Beta test phase will most likely last until the beginning of October. Depending on the number of reports and feedback from our beta testers, the final release of Wallpaper Cycler 3.5 is scheduled for the October to November timeframe.

The following new features have been implemented in Wallpaper Cycler:

• A non-administrator can now install Wallpaper Cycler. 
• Added support for MakerNotes in EXIF for Canon, Olympus and Pentax.
• Finished the help file with description of all new features.

 I also made the following bug fixes for Wallpaper Cycler:

• When deleting a wallpaper from a category WPC now selects the next wallpaper instead of jumping to the top of the list each time a wallpaper is deleted.
• Fixed an issue with URL wallpapers when your cycling time is just 1 or 2 seconds.

I also reviewed the complete tags-code, checked that the Lite version is working, changed some DLL registration to allow for non-administrator installations, moved the screensaver from the Windows system directory to the local Wallpaper Cycler directory to allow non-administrator installations and started to prepare the Beta. Closed Beta testing will start this weekend or early next week.

The following new features have been implemented in Wallpaper Cycler:

• Slideshow Mode: In slideshow mode, Wallpaper Cycler will use a different cycling timeout than in normal cycling mode. You can enable/disable cycling mode from the main window or with a hotkey.
• When you set the tiling mode of a wallpaper object in a layout to “Tile” then you can now choose between the following for the offset calculation:
  • Auto: The offset will be calculated automatically based on the upper-left corner of your monitor.
  • Manual: This allows you to manually specify an offset in pixels.
  • Center: (New) The offset will be calculated automatically such that the image in the middle will be center.
• The “File > Document Settings” and the “Tools > Program Settings” have been merged into 1 dialog to make it easier to find settings. The menu entries “File > Document Settings” and “Tools > Program Settings” are left but now point to the same dialog. So now you have all settings in one place.
• In the calendar notes object in layouts you can now specify the number of days that should be rendered after the current day.
• When you select the “My Wallpapers” category, WPC will not immediately display all wallpapers in the listview but will instead show a little note in the listview to say that this might take a while depending on the number of wallpapers. When you then double click the listview, all wallpapers will be shown. This is to prevent WPC from freezing for a few seconds when you have lots of wallpapers and you select the “My Wallpapers” category.
• You can now get a fullscreen preview of the selected wallpaper. There is a “Preview Wallpaper…” in the menu when you right click a wallpaper or you can use the spacebar on your keyboard to quickly open the preview for the selected wallpaper. The preview can also be closed with the spacebar.
• “Quick Disable” hotkeys: These allow you to define system wide hotkeys to quickly disable a specific category. You can define as many of these hotkeys as you want. When the current wallpaper on your desktop is from a category that you disable with a “Quick Disable” hotkey, Wallpaper Cycler will automatically cycle to the next wallpaper.
  A “Quick Disable” Category hotkey can also be configured to show a hierarchical menu of all your categories from which you select the category to disable.
• Import/export calendar notes.

I also made the following bug fixes for Wallpaper Cycler:

• Saving WCL files is between 2 and 3 times faster now + the save algorithm has been changed as to prevent corruption of the WCL file when Windows is shutting down and Wallpaper Cycler doesn’t get enough time to save its WCL file. 
• When stretching images, sometimes a slight border artifact was visible on the edges of the image. This was especially noticable when enlarging small white wallpapers. 
• When specifying a positive tiling offset for a wallpaper object in a layout, you would see a color bar where there should be a part of the image. The tiling offset parameter should now work correctly with positive and negative offsets.
• The HTML text object editor in the layout editor crashed with:
  <hr><B><FONT size=”18″ face=”Arial” style=”+b-u-s+i”>Top News Headlines</FONT></B>
  -> crashed because no \n after <hr>
• If a category has a large number of files WPC jumps to the top of the list each time a wallpaper is moved to another category. That makes it harder to continue the check of the files. One has to scroll down again to find the last checked wallpaper and continue from that point. WPC now selects the next file in the list after a file is moved to another category.

The following new features have been implemented in Wallpaper Cycler:

• Non-existing wallpapers are shown in red in the details view. In the thumbnails view they are shown with a red sign + “Not valid” as thumbnail.
  (NOTE: this is not implemented for URL wallpapers because checking if an URL wallpaper is still valid would slow WPC down too much when browsing the categories)
• A wallpaper object in a layout can now be linked to a random wallpaper from a selected search folder.
• When you specify a text color for a specific wallpaper, this text color is now also used as default color when rendering text on your layout. Previously the default layout text color was always white.
  (NOTE: When you specify “Automatic” as text color for your wallpaper then Wallpaper Cycler will still use white as default color for layout text because the text color is calculated after the desktop has been rendered and that color is then used for the icons on your desktop.)
• A “Rename Wallpaper…” option has been added to the menu when you right click a wallpaper in Wallpaper Cycler. This allows you to rename the wallpaper in your list AND on your harddisk. 
  This provides a more complete wallpaper management program without the need to go digging through foders and files looking for files to rename or edit, externally to Wallpaper Cycler.
• Every object in a layout can now have a Link Target. This can be an executable, document, URL, … When you click or double click (configurable) that object on your desktop the Link Target is executed.
  Example of use: put a link to http://www.nuonsoft.com/blog/ on your desktop. When you click that text object that site is openend in your default webbrowser. The screenshot below shows an example that uses Link Targets.
  (NOTE: When using URLs as Link Targets for layout objects and you use Internet Explorer and you want the links to open in a new window instead of reusing an existing IE window, in IE go to “Tools > Internet Options > Advanced” and disable “Reuse windows for launching shortcuts”.)

 I also made the following bug fixes for Wallpaper Cycler:

• When one user in Windows XP or later was running WPC and a second user with Fast User Switching would start WPC, the second user would get an “Unable to initialize RPC. The Wallpaper Cycler screen saver will not work.” error. This is now fixed and all users that login to the machine at the same time will have a working screensaver.
• The Calendar Notes Editor didn’t work correctly when opened by double clicking on calendar notes objects on the desktop.
• The random selection algorithm for selecting wallpapers for a wallpaper object set to random in a layout could show often the same image in previous versions of Wallpaper Cycler. In the new version, WPC remembers which wallpapers have already been shown and takes this into account for selecting a random wallpaper for those wallpaper layout objects.
  It works by assigning a flag to each wallpaper. When a wallpaper is chosen, this flag is set to true. So, when you have some smaller wallpaper objects on your layout, WPC will try to select wallpapers that have this flag set to false. When all flags are set to true, WPC will reset the flags to false. In this way, you will have different images most of the time, unless there are not enough images available in the category or when WPC has to reset the flags in the middle of rendering the layout. For example: suppose you have 4 wallpaper objects on your layout. Suppose that after chosing a wallpaper for 2 objects, WPC detects that all flags are set to true. Because of this WPC will reset the flags to false, and then the chance exists that it might select a duplicate image for the 2 other wallpaper objects.