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What's New?
This page lists the changes in each version of Wallpaper Cycler.
Version 3.6.0.180
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New features: (Learn more about all the features.)
- 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 COM DLL has been removed because it gave too much problems
on 64 bit versions of Windows. Replaced by a WPCController tool.
- The fullscreen preview now shows a '(Image x of y)' in the lower
left wallpaper information block.
- New WPCController tool. This is a small application that accepts
commandline parameters to control Wallpaper Cycler. It replaces the
COM DLL. This is now used by the Windows Gadget instead of the COM
DLL.
- Better support for High DPI systems, preventing blurry text and
icons on Vista and later. WPC is now fully High DPI Aware.
- All tree controls now have nicer selection on Windows Vista and
up.
- All ListView controls now have nicer selection on Windows Vista
and up.
- New option "Cycle wallpaper when display settings changed". This
in combination with the "Smart Orientation" feature is very useful
for example for tablet users. When the tablet is rotated, WPC can
automatically cycle the wallpaper to pick one that fits the new
orientation.
- New option under "Tools > Program Settings > Document >
Wallpaper Default Settings" to assign a default tag to newly added
wallpapers. By default this is set to "To Be Reviewed". This makes
it easy to use a search folder to find all wallpapers with this "To
Be Reviewed" tag so you can review the tags for the new wallpapers.
- A wallpaper object on a layout can now be set to "Random from
same category and with given tag".
- The skip extensions dialog now contains a button to reset the
list to the default list of skipped extensions.
- Cycling is working now on Windows 7.
- You can now rotate any image by 90°, 180° or 270°.
- The N/A that was rendered to the desktop when something went
wrong with processing a news feed can now be disabled in the global
WPC settings. When disabled, WPC will not render any text when a
news feed error happens.
- Also allow F2 and Slow Double Click to rename wallpapers,
however, in that case a dialog pops up in which you do the renaming,
because a warning message has to be displayed.
- You can now press CTRL+C in the EXIF data dialog to copy the
selected EXIF data to the clipboard.
- A new option in Tools > Program Settings > Miscellaneous to
disable the error balloons that are shown when something goes wrong
while downloading a news feed.
- Added a button to the toolbar to quickly change the cycling
settings (delay between wallpapers).
- Added a button to the toolbar to quickly change the cycling
sound.
- Rendering now happens in a separate thread, not blocking the
main GUI thread.
- The rendering thread will be switched to low priority if the
rendering was initiated by a timer.
- The rendering thread will stay at normal priority when the user
forced WPC to cycle the wallpaper.
- On Windows Vista or later, the rendering thread will use low
priority I/O in case the rendering was initiated by a timer.
- The info panel will now allow you to quickly check if a
wallpaper is linked to a layout either directly or indirectly
through one of its parent categories.
- A new Info Panel has been implemented that removes the
Information Frame on the right of the main window.
- Hicolor toolbars/menus.
- The uninstaller will no longer remove the license information.
- New option to automatically rerender the wallpaper when resuming
from standy or hibernation.
- Added a TrialPay button to the Buy-Dialog.
- The fullscreen preview window now scales the image with the same
high quality as when rendered to the desktop. This feature can be
disabled to speed up the preview on slower systems. Can be
enabled/disabled from the global WPC settings or by pressing Q in
the fullscreen preview.
- A new toolbar button to quickly toggle between thumbnail view
and details view.
- New option "Cycle once every day and exit at windows logon".
- New option to enable/disable the feature that WPC will
automatically select the new wallpaper in the main window when
cycling to the next or previous wallpaper.
- You can now rename a layout by slowly double clicking the layout
or pressing F2 in the list in the main window of WPC.
- When you click on the My Wallpapers category, the wallpapers are
only shown after double clicking a message. This is done to prevent
performance issues with large wallpaper lists. An option has been
added to disable this behaviour and to show the wallpapers
immediately when clicking the My Wallpapers category.
- Option to hide the message that says "Failed to install
ChangeNotification on..." when the folder synchronization function
could not be installed (for example: remote drives)
- The folder synchronization feature now recursively will detect
new sub folders and will create the appropriate categories for those
new folders.
- On a clean installation, the folder synchronization feature will
by default skip *.db, *.ini, *.avi and *.lnk files. This behaviour
can always be changed by adding/removing extensions in Tools >
Program Settings > Global > Folder Synchronization > Skip
Extensions.
- Every layout object now has an option called "visible" that can
be used to hide an object from the desktop.
- You can now also pick a color from the selected wallpaper to use
as text color, just as you were able to pick a color for the
background.
- Two new options "Align Horizontal" and "Align Vertical" for a
wallpaper object in a layout. These allow you to change the
alignment of the wallpaper in that wallpaper object, so you can for
example stretch to height + align to right or other combinations.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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 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.
Bug fixes:
- 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 the screensaver or a locked desktop, the
timer of Wallpaper Cycler sometimes didn't count down anymore.
- Windows Gadget was not displaying correctly on Windows 7 Beta
and on Windows 7 RC.
- Height of new tray icon has been increased with 1 pixel to match
the height of the old icon.
- The mouse 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.
- "Rerender on resume" now has a delay of 10 seconds to give
Windows time to restore network connections for example.
- The toolbars were not in High Color on a Dutch version of
Windows.
- The "Rendering in progress" error is now only shown when the
user manually initiates a cycle wallpaper request.
- Removed the tip of the day, since noone ever reads that anyway.
- The rotation option for wallpapers only worked when the tiling
setting was set to "Stretch (Keep Aspect Ratio)".
- WPC will now correctly render the wallpaper when running in High
DPI mode, previously it could result in some tiling effect to become
visible.
- Error messages during rendering appeared behind the main WPC
window, causing confusion.
- Calendar template "Bright" had 2 times the year at the top.
- The "Random" screensaver transition effect was not that 'random'
and sometimes a bit slow.
- Wallpaper Cycler can rerender the wallpaper automatically when
the screen resolution has changed. This is an old feature, but is
now enabled by default.
- The "Spiral In" and "Box In" screensaver transition effects left
a 3-5 pixel horizontal line in the middle of the screen when running
at 1440x900.
- Link targets didn't work on wallpaper objects, calendar objects
and frame objects.
- Removed font references to Californian in templates since that's
not a font installed by default on Windows.
- The new text object renderer in a layout again properly
calculates the bounding box.
- WPC would crash when a layout contained a calendar object that
was too small to render all days.
- WPC would crash when a layout contained an object with a width
or height of 0.
- Rendering of gradients was broken after adding the rotation
option to wallpapers.
- The small preview image in the OSD was sometimes cut off.
- The pick background/text color dialogs now correctly keeps
aspect ratio of the image.
- The info panel will now allow you to quickly check if a
wallpaper is linked to a layout either directly or indirectly
through one of its parent categories. This now also properly
includes links made with tags to layouts.
- The RSS feeds again shows a brief description of a feed entry
and not the entire entry.
- View Details/Thumbnails now have an icon in the Wallpapers menu.
- "move layout up..." "move layout down..." menu items, those
"..." don't need to be there.
- Open a wcl, then go to File>Open, click Cancel, previous WCL was
closed.
- An issue with resizing the main window and the tiling combo box
in the Info Panel.
- The HTML renderer for text objects in a layout has been changed.
Hopefully this solves issues with rendering certain RSS feeds.
- When WPC is starting up, the tray icon now has gray arrows. Once
the WCL has been loaded the arrows will become either red or blue
depending on whether WPC is cycling or not.
- The IsHiddenSystemFolder check was only done when importing a
new folder. Now it is also done during synchronization of
folderlinks.
- When doing a recursive import of a folder, system subfolders
like the "recycle bin" and "System Volume Information" will be
skipped automatically.
- The new 3.6 installer will check if a previous version is
installed and will ask to uninstall it. This is needed because quite
a few new DLLs are being used and we want to get rid of the old
ones.
- After uninstalling the previous version, the new 3.6 installer
will automatically remove any oleacc.dl_ and/or dwmapi.dl_ files in
the folder of the previous installation. These files were created by
a Wallpaper Cycler Windows Vista patch and don't get uninstalled by
the uninstaller.
- The new 3.6 installer will save your registration username and
serial number before running the uninstaller and will restore your
username and serial number after installing the new version.
- Due to the new HTML renderer, you can no longer set a specific
horizontal and vertical shadow offset. Only 1 shadow offset is
available which is used both horizontally and vertically.
- Screensaver will now also either take a random wallpaper or
cycle them sequentially depending on the cycling settings of
Wallpaper Cycler.
- Previous/next wallpaper button wants to select previous/next
wallpaper immediately in main window when it's open, before
rendering thread has finished.
- When you get an error regarding ChangeNotification or
NextChangeNotification, it is explained in the messagebox what the
result of that error is.
- In layout objects, the "Link Target On Single Click" would not
always work properly.
- When libexif.dll is not available, it doesn't crash anymore.
- The libexif.dll is now only loaded once instead of
loaded/unloaded on every use.
- Fixed a memory leak when loading JPEG2000 images.
- Some PCX files caused Wallpaper Cycler to crash.
- When the main window is opened and thumbnails are being loaded,
they will now start loading from where the scrollbar is, instead of
starting with thumbnail 1.
- The name of the month and days was wrongly capitalized on for
example Croatian settings.
- The Info Panel will now remember whether it should display the
full name or the short name.
- Extension *.lnk has been added to the folder synchronization
extension exclusion list. A future version will properly support
links to images and to folders.
- Readme and license txt files are now fixed width, which reads
easier on wide screen monitors and which is according to the RFC2822
regarding text documents.
- You could often not use the arrow keys and the spacebar key to
check/uncheck items in the list on the right in Program Settings >
Global > Miscellaneous.
- On a clean install, the main window will be bigger by default if
you have a bigger monitor.
- Enlarged minimum window height due to new Info Panel.
- In new layout wizard, when you click the calendar template
button, the Wallpaper Cycler calendar template folder will be opened
by default.
- The zlib library has been updated to the latest version.
- When the folder synchronization kicks in in the background, no
progressbar is shown anymore.
- F3 (Find Next) would not always work.
- 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.
- 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.
- Instead of hardcoding the online help URL, derive it from the
version number.
- 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.
- Wallpaper Cycler didn't always start automatically when logging
in to Windows and autostart was enabled.
- cycle-at-time 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.
- oleacc.dll is now only installed on anything pre-xp
- 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.
- The Vista gadget didn't install on vista 64 bit. (wrong program
files folder)
- You were unable to specify "-1" for the "Days After Current Day"
in layouts > Calendar Notes Object > Edit Calendar Notes > General
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Version 3.5.0.97
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New features: (Learn more about all the features.)
- "Tags":
- Tags can be assigned to wallpapers and/or categories. Wallpapers
inherit tags from its parent categories.
- Tags can be assigned to layouts and/or layout categories.
Layouts inherit tags from its parent layout categories. This allows
you to create a layout that will be used for wallpapers with certain
tags.
- Tags can easily be selected for wallpapers or layouts with the
bar on the right of the main window.
- The tags selection section in the bar on the right of the main
window can be resized with an option in the WPC settings.
- Tags can be globally renamed, deleted and combined.
- A "Tags Details" window gives all tags and inherited tags for a
selected wallpaper, category, layout or layout category.
- A wallpaper object in a layout can be linked to a tag to display
a random wallpaper with that tag.
- The following predefined tags exist: Landscape, Portrait and
Square. WPC will automatically assign one of these tags to imported
wallpapers.
- "Search Folders": Each search folder is linked with a search
command. The following search commands are available:
- Find wallpapers with certain tags
- Find wallpapers with a certain piece of text in their filename
or foldername
- Find all wallpapers
- Find enabled/disabled wallpapers
- Find wallpapers that have already been cycled to
- Find wallpapers that haven't yet been cycled to
- Boolean combination (And, Or, Not) of several other search
commands (even nested boolean commands)
- 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 now contains an item to open quote editor.
- Sorting in thumbnail view: A new menu item in Wallpapers > View
> Sort.
- 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".
- The main window is now opened with the 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.
- "Cycle once a day and do not exit at windows logon" option.
- New option for Calendar Notes objects: "Header Cell Weekend Day
With Note" formatting.
- You can now specify multiple masks (up to 10) for a mask effect
and WPC will choose one of these masks randomly.
- 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 support for MakerNotes in EXIF for Canon, Olympus and
Pentax.
- 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.
- You can now configure the CPU load threshold between 0% and
100%.
- Updated AGG to 2.4.
- 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.
- New option in the layout editor to vertically and horizontally
center 1 object to another object.
- Allow install as non-administrator.
- Wizard to help you add new wallpapers, layouts and to explain
the basics of Wallpaper Cycler. This is shown when opening the main
window to make it easier for first-time-users. This can of course be
disabled.
- 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.
- Import/export calendar notes.
- "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.
- Windows Vista Sidebar Gadget that allows you to start/stop
cycling, cycle to next/previous wallpaper, switch on/off slideshow
mode and more. The gadget uses the Wallpaper Cycler COM .NET DLL for
communication with Wallpaper Cycler.
- In the calendar notes object in layouts you can now specify the
number of days that should be rendered after the current day.
- 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.
- COM .NET DLL: This is a COM object which exports the following
functions for controlling Wallpaper Cycler from third party
applications:
- StartCycling()
- StopCycling()
- NextWallpaper()
- PreviousWallpaper()
- ToggleSlideshowMode()
- ToggleMainWindow()
- GetNumberOfSecondsTillNextCycle()
- IsCycling()
- RerenderCurrentWallpaper()
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- NextWallpaperFromSameCat()
- RestartCycling()
- SetNoWallpaperOnDesktop()
- RefreshDesktop()
- ShowQuoteEditor()
- ShowNotesEditor()
- ShowCalendarNotesEditor()
- ShowManageFeeds()
- ShowDisplayProperties()
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- 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.
- 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 centered.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- A wallpaper object in a layout can now be linked to a random
wallpaper from a selected search folder.
- Smart Orientation Feature (= Landscape/Portrait feature)
- The following predefined tags exist: Landscape, Portrait and
Square. WPC will automatically assign one of these tags to
imported wallpapers.
- Search folders can be used to find all Landscape, Portrait or
Square wallpapers.
- Layouts can be linked with the tags Landscape, Portrait and
Square.
- When the Smart Orientation Feature is enabled, WPC will check
the aspect ratio of the primary monitor and based on that will use
a certain set of wallpapers (landscape or portrait wallpapers)
- 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.
- "Give Tags" Hotkeys: These allow you to define system wide
hotkeys to give tags to the current wallpaper. You can define as
many of these hotkeys as you want.
- A "Give Tags" hotkey can also be configured to show a menu with
all your tags. With this menu you can quickly add and remove tags
from the current wallpaper.
- "Move To" Category Hotkeys: These allow you to define system
wide hotkeys to move the current wallpaper to a predefined wallpaper
category. You can define as many of these hotkeys as you want.
- A "Move To" Category hotkey can also be configured to show a
hierarchical menu of all your categories from which you select the
category to which you want to move the current wallpaper.
- You can now change the location of the "NuonSoft WPC
Wallpaper.bmp" that is generated by Wallpaper Cycler.
- "Post Cycling Script": This is a Windows Scripting file for
example JScript or VBScript that will be executed after cycling the
wallpaper. The one and only parameter to this script is the name of
the file to which Wallpaper Cycler has rendered the desktop. As an
example a "Microsoft Powerdesk Powertool.js" script is installed in
the "Post Cycling Scripts" subfolder of the Wallpaper Cycler
installation folder. This script makes sure that when Wallpaper
Cycler changes the wallpaper that it will be changed on all desktops
of the MS Powerdesk Powertool.
- Wallpaper Cycler now keeps track of two kinds of statistics:
- "Global" Statistics:
- Number of desktop cycles
- Number of screensaver cycles
- Total number of CPU-Load-Skipped cycles
- "WCL" statistics (document specific):
- 20 Most used wallpapers
- 20 Least used wallpapers
- Usage of all wallpapers
- The calendar object in a layout can now display the header of
the current day with different formatting than other header cells.
- The calendar object in a layout can now display days with notes
with different formatting than other days.
- Objects in a layout can now be locked to prevent moving and
resizing.
- In the screensaver you can now press the "left-arrow" key on
your keyboard to go back to the previous image. (Note: you can go
back only 1 step).
- The layout editor now remembers if "Snap to grid" option is
enabled or not.
- Find & Replace: This allows you to find part of a wallpaper name
and replace it with something else. This feature is especially
useful when you've moved your wallpapers from for example
d:\data\wallpapers to e:\wallpapers. In that case you can Find &
Replace all "d:\data\wallpapers" and replace it with
"e:\wallpapers". Note: this will not physically rename the files on
your harddisk!
- New "Open Image With..." when right clicking an image in the
main window of Wallpaper Cycler. This will open the selected image
in a user defined program. The user can configure which program to
run.
- The screensaver will now remember the name of the layout last
used so that layout cycling can continue from there on the next
screensaver run.
- It is now visually more clear which day is selected in the
yellow calendar on the right of the calendar notes editor.
- On a clean installation, Wallpaper Cycler will set "db" as
default extension to skip during folder synchronization.
- New calendar templates.
- New stretching mode: "Stretch to fill". Depending on
monitor/wallpaper resolution/aspect ratio this will stretch to width
or to height.
- Shortcut (Ctrl+Enter) to quickly edit a category.
- The bar on the right of the main window will now change
depending on whether a layout or wallpaper is selected.
- When browsing for a Calendar or Calendar Notes Template, a small
preview bitmap is shown in the open dialog.
- Cleaned up the properties dialog for wallpaper categories.
- Option to expand/collapse all wallpaper/layout categories.
- New "CaptionBar" with details about the selected category or
layout category. Right click the CaptionBar to configure what
information should be visible in the CaptionBar and what not.
- Generation of thumbnails is much faster now (for JPEG's).
Thumbnails are generated between 3 to 4 times faster.
- In the screensaver you can now press the "right-arrow" key on
your keyboard to advance to the next image.
- New fields: Author Name, Author Email, Author Website and Theme
Description for Calendar Notes Templates, just like it already
existed for Calendar Templates.
- Nicer alpha blended selection of thumbnails on Windows XP or
later.
- The thumbnails in the listview don't display black bars anymore
if the aspect ratio of the image doesn't match the listview image
aspect ratio.
- A red "Skipped Cycles" pane in the statusbar will display the
number of skipped cycles due to CPU load monitoring once a cycle has
been skipped. When you double click that pane, the CPU load
monitoring settings dialog appears.
- Double click on the "time until next cycle" pane in the
statusbar will open the cycling settings dialog.
- WPC now remembers which wallpaper categories and layout
categories are expanded or not.
- Added option for auto-save after auto-sync.
- New hotkeys:
- "Restore and stop cycling".
- "Open current wallpaper" + tray menu item
- "Open current wallpaper in Explorer" + tray menu item
- "Remove current wallpaper from list and Cycle" + tray menu
item
- "Delete current wallpaper and Cycle" + tray menu item
- "Toggle desktop icons".
- Option to disable the synchronization results balloon.
- Weekend coloring for calendar notes bar.
Bug fixes:
- Black dot appeared in corners sometimes when using small corner
rounding values for wallpaper objects with a border of a few pixels.
- 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.
- When opening a layout with a calendar notes object in the layout
editor and that layout was currently on the desktop, the calendar
notes object on the desktop was not clickable anymore.
- A message is shown when cpu monitoring/time synchronization was
enabled and is being disabled because you are not an administrator
anymore.
- 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, although
the range is only 0-100.
- In the layout editor, editing settings in the Effects dialog
gave some unexpected behaviour.
- In the righthand properties (e.g. in the layout editor), you
couldn't tab through all properties. You would get stuck whenever a
value (text, number) could be typed in the property because the
value becomes selected when you tabbed to its attribute.
- 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 was not automatically updated.
- When adding an existing URL wallpaper and then deleting the
image from the website, the thumbnail was not updated.
- When "Adding an URL Wallpaper" that was non-existing, WPC didn't
complain, it just added the wallpaper and made it black. Instead of
black, the red sign is now shown and a note "Not downloadable or not
valid.".
- Suppose WPC window was visible, with a category of wallpapers
visible. Opening explorer and adding a wallpaper to WPC using the
shellintegration and selecting a category that was currently visible
in WPC, the view within WPC was not updated once this image was
added, you had to go to another category and come back before you
could see the new wallpaper.
- 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 gradient banner in the settings window now has correct left
and right margins on Vista.
- "Rerender Wallpaper" in Tools menu now has an icon.
- When selecting "My Layouts" and there were no layouts directly
in "My Layouts", a message was displayed saying "no layouts
defined." even though there were layouts defined in the
subcategories of "My Layouts". Message has been changed to "No
layouts defined in this category".
- Calendar Notes Editor: The textbox is now a bit bigger by
default and you can resize the textbox now.
- Added a note to the Calendar 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 now has a banner.
- If you disable "Cycle with delay" and "Cycle at specific times"
and WPC is currently cycling, WPC will now stop cycling.
- When clicking "Start cycling" and "Cycle with delay"/"cycle at
specific times" were both disabled, a dialog gave a warning and now
has a link to go directly to the cycling settings instead of only
describing the steps.
- The layout template "Wallpaper with 'paper'-border" would
display incorrect 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.
- Removed the cycling sound when clicking on "Set No Wallpaper On
Desktop".
- Added filename of currently opened WCL-file in "Settings"-window
behind "document" settings entry.
- A 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.
- All \ characters in wallpaper- and layout category names are
automatically replaced by / because \ is not allowed.
- Added a line in the CPU Load monitoring settings window to
divide the settings in 2 logical block.
- 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".
- When importing notes in the Calendar Notes Editor, exact
duplicate notes are skipped during import.
- Calendar Notes Editor: the textbox flickered quite a bit when
resizing the window.
- Removed the sub-menu in Tools for the Thumbnail Database and
moved the Manage Thumbnail Database directly into the Tools menu.
- Clicking help in the "Text Editor"-window opened the notes
editor help, not the text editor help.
- Calendar Notes Editor: Selecting a day in the second or third
month displayed and the view would jump so the month in which you
clicked becomes the first displayed. Now it's not jumping anymore.
- 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.
- Some screensaver effects were terribly slow when the desktop was
still visible underneath, so for rendering the first image (on
Vista).
- EXIF: Maximal and Minimal Aperture Canon Maker Notes were
sometimes displayed with lots of zeros.
- The Settings Window and Large Fonts gave a few texts that were,
with the default window size, not visible.
- The little preview that appears in the Add Wallpaper File dialog
is much much faster now (for JPG's).
- Using the folder synchronization on certain NAS boxes resulted
in a reproducable crash.
- Doubleclicking the calendar notes object on the desktop opened
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) opened a second edit window.
- Notes-object Text Editor: using any of the toolbar buttons was
not be undoable.
- Helpfile: All external links now open with an external IE
window.
- Made the minimum width/height of layout-editor bigger.
- On the "Find Non Existing Images" results-window, the helpbutton
went to the wrong topic.
- Reduced volume of standard cycling sound.
- "Previous Wallpaper" didn't select the new wallpaper like "Next
Wallpaper" does.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- If a category had a large number of files WPC jumped to the top
of the list each time a wallpaper was moved to another category.
That maked it harder to continue to check the rest of the files. You
had to scroll down again to find the last checked wallpaper and
continue from that point.
- 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.
- Calendar notes editor didn't work correctly when opened by
double clicking on calendar notes object on desktop.
- When one user in Windows XP or later was running WPC and a
second user (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.
- Random selection algorithm for selecting wallpapers for a
wallpaper object set to random in a layout could show often the same
image. Now WPC remembers which wallpapers have already been shown
and takes this into account for selecting a random wallpaper for
those wallpaper layout objects.
- On several places there was "SatErday" instead of "SatUrday".
- "Move up/down wallpapers" was enabled when "My wallpapers" was
selected.
- If a timelimit on a parent category enabled that parent
category, the children categories were not enabled.
- The setup files had version 0.0.0.0 instead of the Wallpaper
Cycler version.
- When a wallpaper object was outside the screenarea you got an
"out of memory" message when using that layout.
- Fixed typo in OSD: "Start Cyling" should be "Start Cycling".
- Fixed lots of "flickering" when moving a window over the
listview when it contains a message "no items to display...".
- Duplicates in feeds-menu when having title + description of a
specific feed item on the desktop have been removed.
- When closing the layout editor, a random layout got selected in
the main list instead of the one that was edited.
- Sometimes there was a division by 0 in the random number
generator.
- Fixed that WPC could crash when deleting wallpapers in the
"Finding non-existing images" dialog while the main window was still
generating thumbnails for the listview.
- Fixed crash when specifying an outside border for an object and
setting that object at position 0,0.
- When configuring non-overlapping time limits on all categories,
shutting down WPC during 1 time limit, rebooting WPC during another
time limit would wrongly disable all categories instead of disabling
the category with the old time limit and enabling the category with
the new time limit. This has been fixed.
- Fixed the issue that you got a message like "Unable to get
wallpaper for wallpaper object with name "Wallpaper Object 1"." when
using a wallpaper object in a layout and set it to "Random wallpaper
from same category" and the category only had 1 wallpaper in it.
- Added the name of the layout to the following message that can
appear: "Unable to get wallpaper for wallpaper object with name
"Copy of Wallpaper Object 1" in layout with name "layout 1"."
- Fixed redraw bugs in thumbnail listview when resizing window.
- Folder Synchronization Result balloon contains a more clear
message now and you can click it to get the synchronization details.
- Time Synchronization Result balloon contains a more clear
message now and only shows 2 digits after the comma.
- Linear gradients didn't always render properly.
- Rotation for linear gradients didn't work properly.
- Wallpaper Cycler should not crash anymore with hardware DEP
enabled.
- Fixed a crash that happened sometimes when calculating the
desktop icon background color.
- Properly handling context menus in the tree and the wallpaper
list on the main window with shift+F10.
- Fixed an infinite loop on certain jpg images.
- Renamed "Synchronize Folder Links..." menu item to "Synchronize
All Categories...".
- Renamed "Remove Wallpaper" menu item in tools menu to "Set No
Wallpaper On Desktop".
- Restructured the tray menu.
- New "Delete Wallpapers" which removes selected wallpapers from
the list + deletes them physically. The "Delete Wallpapers" from
previous version is now called "Remove Wallpapers From List".
- If you started a folder synchronization manually and at the same
time WPC started synchronizing automatically, all new images were added twice.
- Cycle-at-times was not always working properly.
- Mutual exclusive 'cycle at' or 'cycle with delay' ; you cannot
enable both anymore to prevent problems and confusion.
- The "Remove" button for cycle-at-times was only enabled when more
than 1 item was selected.
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Version 3.1.0.39
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New features: (Learn more about all the features.)
- When cycling to the next wallpaper (unless
sequential cycling is enabled), the category of the current
wallpaper is skipped, meaning WPC will try to get a random wallpaper
from other categories, unless ofcourse all other wallpapers have
already been randomly chosen and the current category does still
contain wallpapers that haven't been chosen randomly.
- You can now change the order of wallpapers in
each category.
- A new option in "File > Document Settings >
Text Color Settings" to also use the automatically calculated
background color (based on desktop icon positions) as the true
background color for the wallpaper and not only for the icons.
- Much improved quality with image scaling
especially for shrinking images.
- Support for the GIF file format (not animated
gif files): Because the Unisys GIF patents are expired now,
Wallpaper Cycler now supports GIF files.
- "Random from fixed category" option for
wallpaper objects in a layout.
- Show EXIF data from wallpapers (for example
digital camera data).
- A hand-cursor is now shown when you move your
mouse on the desktop over an object on which you can double click
(for example: the Calendar Notes objects)
- A Calendar Notes Object that can be added to
layouts.
- The tray icon right click menu has a new
"show/hide desktop icons" item.
- You can now specify default wallpaper settings
(tiling and layout) for new wallpapers added to Wallpaper Cycler.
- A basic RSS reader has been added which allows
you to display RSS headlines on your desktop and quickly launch the
internet-link associated with an RSS feed news-item.
- Screensaver module with 40+ transition effects.
- You can now attach a third party application to
each wallpaper. A program can be executed when a specific wallpaper
disappears from the desktop or when it appears on the desktop. This
allows you to for example use a third party application to make
custom icon-layouts for each wallpaper. Wallpaper Cycler can add the
name of the wallpaper as part of the parameters to the third party
app. (see help for more info)
- A new option "Do not cycle during screensaving
or locked desktop" in "Tools > Program Settings > Miscellaneous".
Enable this option to prevent Wallpaper Cycler from cycling the
wallpaper when a screensaver is running or when you have locked your
desktop.
- A new option to automatically rerender the
wallpaper when your resolution changes.
- Wallpaper Cycler can now automatically detect
and synchronize new wallpapers.
- The tray icon right click menu now contains a
"Synchronize Folder Links" item.
- An auto-time-creator for cycle-at times. For
example: auto-create a cycle-at time every 10 minutes: 00:10:00,
00:20:00, ...
- New options for transparency effect: several
merge modes: Normal, Subtract, Add, Multiply, Divide, Difference,
Screen.
- You can now link 2 wallpaper objects in a
layout.
- When starting a new layout, you can choose to
use a little wizard to help you.
- When starting a new layout, you can start from
some templates.
- Added a thumbnail preview to the "Add Wallpaper
Image" dialog.
- Calendar: you can now hide the weekdays.
- The On Screen Display (OSD) is now anti-aliased
and looks much better.
- Synchronize a specific folder.
- Wallpaper Cycler can synchronize the time with
an internet time server.
- When you use the "Next Wallpaper" button in the
Wallpaper Cycler main window, the new wallpaper is automatically
highlighted in the wallpaper list.
- You can now hide the taskpane on the right of
the Wallpaper Cycler main window.
- The "Add Folder Recursively" option now
remembers the last selected folder.
- Added a hot key for "Exit" and "Exit And
Restore"
Bug fixes:
- When thumbnail view was enabled, and the thumbnails were just being created, deleting
the current wallpaper category caused a crash.
- Some PNG images were loaded to dark.
- Minor issue with OSD position.
- If themes were disabled in Windows XP, setting
"Always use XP-style menus" to false in Wallpaper Cycler still
rendered XP style menus.
- The installer will now use the correct
localized program files folder as default.
- After explorer crash: automatically calculating
background color didn't work anymore.
- Banner in settings window is cut off with
StyleXP.
- The algorithm for choosing a random wallpaper
had a serious flaw: it would only choose between the first 32767
wallpapers in your list. The new algorithm uses a Mersenne Twister
Algorithm and doesn't have the 32767 limitation.
- URLs with a ? at the end didn't work.
- The filename-based duplicate finder works much
faster now with huge number of wallpapers.
- Populating the listview (in text or thumbnail
mode) in the main window with the wallpapers is much faster now when
using thousands of wallpapers.
- Wallpaper Cycler could crash when trying to
delete a large category and all of its sub categories.
- Crash when an object in a layout (wallpaper
object for example) touches the right side of the screen and has a
border width of > 0 with "Inside Border" disabled.
- The cycle-at-times didn't always work.
- Entering lots of cycle-at-times is now more
user friendly. Your last added cycle-at-time gets selected in the
list.
- The desktop icons would reappear when you had
enabled "Hide desktop icons" in WPC, and you had disabled the "Show
desktop icons" in Windows itself.
- An issue with the URL Wallpapers (for example
webcams). Sometimes the image was retrieved from the local cache
instead of from the internet.
- Allow < 5 seconds cycling times.
- Calendar editor: fixed an issue when you
disabled the week-numbers.
- Horizontal and vertical gradient were incorrect
when not square.
- Removed the "You can only cycle the wallpaper
30 times in one session." limitation from the trial.
- You can now run the trial 30 times instead of
20 times.
- Find Next would sometimes crash.
- Selecting lots of images in the imagelist with
the shift-select-combo, caused the info-bar to be redrawn for each
image -> was very slow.
- Fixed some issues with importing .WCL v2.x
files.
- "Add to Wallpaper Cycler" from the windows
shell -> category tree didn't had a scrollbar.
- The difference between file>settings and
tools>options is now better explained and are renamed.
- Some TGA files where inverted and upside-down.
- Fixed a crash when using the delete button in
the toolbar to delete a category.
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