iaza

Well, I'm into that. So after butchering the pig and storing it in the freezer, I bought one of those HTML5 For Idiots books and learned what I could. And then I rolled up my sleeves and converted the entire website to HTML5.

It was a cussed hard job. If I had known how much work it was going to be I don't know if I would have started. Don't let anyone ever tell you this stuff is easy.

But it's done now - and it really is much better. Much faster and more productive, although the new UI does take a bit of getting use to.

So give it a try! Note there may well be some bugs in it, as I literally rewrote everything. So please let me know if you trip over any problems. I promise to do my best to squish the bugs as they crop up.

Meanwhile it's time for some pork soup.

Being a well-adjusted guy I try not to hang out overly much with a computer during such times. And I didn't. But even though I barely opened up the laptop I got a fair bit of work done despite myself this year. I'm not sure if this is a good thing or not.

All that aside, here are a few of the changes:

1. By popular demand Text Stenciling was added. An odd little function imo, but some folks really seem to like it.
2. Crop didn't work well with a variety of browsers. So I completely re-did this feature. This means 99% of the browsers should now work. And the other 1% really should update their browsers.
3. Blend Frame bordering sometimes put weird effects into users images. This has been a bug for like forever, but I finally figured it out.
4. By user request Transparent+ was added - basically a batched transparent. This allows you to transparent a large number of images simulteneously.
5. More cool Artist filters were added.

This is the last blog entry for 2011 - I'm now off to Singapore for a few weeks. Everyone have a great New Year!

But over the last few days I finally got a bit of time. So I fired up the trusty mac laptop, brewed a kettle of tea, and completed a few updates:

1. Transparency now allows you to vary the background colour. Very useful in some situations. For instance, if you transparent "white" you can set the background view to another colour (red,blue,green) and thus verify the transparency converted properly. (Hat tip to the user who suggested this feature to me!).
2. I added a new Border operation - "Geometry". It's a strange thing but kind of interesting if you play with it for awhile.
3. Watermarking is much improved. Among other things, you can now specify exactly the size of the watermark. Also, watermark now better respects the blend percentage setting.
4. The 3D Edge Up/Down operations have now been combined into a single operation.
5. I completely rewrote Power Morph. I've never been happy with this operation as the interface was clunky and difficult to translate into other languages (go ahead, try translating something like "Shutter Morph" into Chinese or Hindi someday - if you dare). It's still not great, but the new interface is certainly an improvment.
6. Improved the speed of a few other random operations.

But, sad to report, on the way home he apparently became lunch (probably eaten either by an orca or a leopard seal). Happy Feet transmits no more.

There's a lesson here somewhere.

Meanwhile it's damn cold. At this rate I expect to see icebergs float by any day.

All this provided a good excuse to come in from the bush, brew some hot tea and make a few fixes to ezimba.

So an update was deployed. Among the changes:

1. Montage was not working correctly - it always used the defaults! This is probably a result of an error introduced in the last update.
2. Frame Animation now allows you to edit the sequence of images directly.
3. Frame Animation is now more liberal with sizes - it won't automatically reduce an image unless it exceeds 900k.
4. New World Mix images were added.
5. Speed improvements were made in the Warps section.
6. The One Colour option now has Fuzz support, making it possible to, you know, actually create one colour.
7. Japanese language support was improved.
8. And some various other things. I forget.

BTW 1, 2, 3 & 7 were based off user feedback submissions. Yes, I really do read those. And sometimes even act on them.

Everyone kept bothering me about a blog. Where is the ezimba blog? Why don't you have a blog? Everyone has a blog and you don't - what are you, a loser?

It got to be tiresome, so I finally relented. I don't like to write and I don't care much for blogs (does anyone really read them?), but hey, no one can accuse me of ignoring demands from the ezimba community. I am your slave.

So here it is: the ezimba blog. I'll use it to announce updates to ezimba, problems, status etc. Just don't expect me to be posting very often!