Wallpaper Cycler Changelog

What's new in Wallpaper Cycler 3.6.0.180

• New 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\AppDataRoamingNuonSoftWallpaperCycler" 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 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 and 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