John's Background Switcher Knowledgebase

John Conners on "John's Background Switcher 4.0 Release Notes"

John Conners — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 10:17:12 +0000

Version 4 of John's Background Switcher sports a completely redesigned user interface (where all the photo sets are shown in the same place) along with a host of cool new features and myriad bug fixes and tweaks. Everything's where you'd expect it to be, the initial user experience should be less confusing and you should find it a lot faster and easier to find things in. There are improvements to almost every aspect of JBS, not to mention new photo sources like Webshots, Google and Bing image searches. There's simplified authorisation, transition effects (on Vista and above), smart sizing and... Well you can see the full list below!

New Features

3639: Unify the settings dialog so all photo sets appear in a single list - and just make it easier to use dag namit!
FEATURE: The settings dialog has been completely redesigned and made a whole lot simpler and intuitive. You add photo sets from as many sources as you like to one big list (instead of flicking between modes) and photos are chosen at random while switching the background from all photo sets.

You also specify the display mode (centre, scale, mosaic, montage, etc) in one place on the settings dialog and there's a preview thumbnail so you know what it's doing. Authorisation settings for sites that support authorisation is also held in one place (a button on the settings dialog).

The new settings dialog should help novices and experienced users alike understand how to use JBS and how to get the best of out it. And about time too!

639: Implement OSX-style fading from background to background
FEATURE: If you're running Windows Vista or newer you can now choose to use a fade effect when changing backgrounds - woo hoo! You'll find this option on the 'General' section of 'More Settings'. Note that you'll need to have the glass-like 'Windows Aero' display option turned on.

3730: Support http compression to massively speed up JBS when using photos from the web
FEATURE: One of the top complaints with JBS was that it was slow to switch backgrounds when you were using pictures from the internet and one of the montage modes. Now JBS fully supports compression over the web (which it really should have done from the start but that's another story) which will drastically cut down how long it takes to switch backgrounds.

819: Add support for Flickr collections
FEATURE: You can now choose photos from Flickr collections in JBS. You can do this for a specific user or from your own photos. Collections are groups of photo sets that you can set up in Flickr.

3373: Implement Google Image Search
FEATURE: You can now choose pictures from any Google Image search natively in JBS. You can optionally choose photos of any exact size (to make sure you only get pictures that perfectly fit your monitor) and any colour you like. So if you only want to see pictures of black cats that are 1680x1050 pixels on your background then Google Image Search is the one for you!

3825: Ensure that RSS feed that contain image enclosures are supported
FEATURE: If you add an RSS feed that contains image enclosures then JBS will now attempt to use them.

3726: Make the photo info text drawn on the desktop easier to read and smoother
FEATURE: The photo information text shown in the top-right of the desktop was a bit blocky and difficult to see under certain circumstances. The text is now much easier to read and uses ClearType text rendering (if it's switched on).

3958: Add the option to space the snapshots out more
FEATURE: There's now an 'Additional spacing between snapshots' option on the 'Montages' section of 'More Settings'. This lets you set a number of pixels to add to the spacing of each snapshot when a snapshots scrapbook is generated.

3334: Support the Pheed RSS photo spec to handle sites like myphotoalbum.com
FEATURE: You can now use any RSS photo feed that supports the 'Pheed' specification in JBS for your background. Basically this means if you want to grab pictures from a photo feed it's a lot more likely that you'll be able to since the 'Pheed' extensions to RSS are becoming more and more popular.

3687: Add support for Phanfare 3.0 site authentication
FEATURE: Phanfare now supports the ability to see photos from other user's sites and now JBS can do the same. This means you can now enter a Phanfare user's screen name and choose from their (visible) photos as well as from your friends and family.

You can also decide if you want to authenticate to Phanfare with your credentials (and can therefore choose from your friends, etc.) or login anonymously.

3627: Implement 'Shuffle' option in 'Pictures' mode
FEATURE: A shuffle option is now used by default for 'Pictures' and 'Folders' added for switching. This means that instead of seeing the same pictures over and over again (when using a single picture per background) the pictures will be shuffled and you'll only see the same one again once all the others have been chosen first.

3695: Improve the first-time user experience so people can understand how to use JBS and get going
FEATURE: A common complaint with JBS was starting it for the first time and then not having a clue how to use it. Now there's a welcome page shown when you first start it (or when there are no photo sets) explaining how to use JBS with a picture of the notification icon (which a lot of people miss). There's also a button to set up some default and combined with the new, easier-to-use settings dialog, it should make JBS simpler to understand. Fingers crossed!

3697: Make Yahoo! searches and pictures lists support montage options (mosaics and snapshot scrapbooks)
FEATURE: Previously 'Pictures' and 'Yahoo!' modes didn't support the various montage background styles - now they do! Although 'Pictures' mode no longer supports the setting of individual picture sizing, they'll all pick up the global display mode. You can't have it all!

3705: Make it easier find the original picture in a montage (like a snapshot scrapbook)
FEATURE: Say you've got a snapshot scrapbook on your desktop and you see a photo you love, but you've no idea where it is. Previously you'd have to bring up the 'Picture' browser, click 'Current background tiles' and look for it there, double-click it and you'll see the original.

Now you can just click 'View current picture' from the notification icon menu and a dialog will pop up containing all the pictures used in the current background. Double-click the one you like and you'll go to the original (hold down Shift to copy the location to the clipboard).

3741: Add the option to remove the notification icon completely
FEATURE: There is now an option in 'More Settings' called 'Show the notification icon down by the clock that controls JBS'. If you uncheck this checkbox then you'll no longer see the notification icon to control JBS (maybe you don't like them). Once removed you can bring up the settings by launching JBS again from a shortcut and you'll be asked if you'd like to see the settings.

2967: Make the montage modes much easier to find
FEATURE: A lot of people completely missed that JBS supported montage options like 'Snapshot Scrapbook'. Now the settings dialog has a single, easy-to-find 'Picture mode' drop down list on the settings dialog that contains all the background options along with little pictures so you can see what they look like.

3881: Add the option to ignore folders of photos based on a wildcard search
FEATURE: You can ignore pictures that are included in folders you've added to JBS by specifying a regular expression. This option is available in the 'Picture Sources' section of 'More Settings' and I recommend you read up on regular expressions before using this option.

3892: Add the option to choose from your Flickr contacts public-only photos
FEATURE: You can now choose public-only contacts photos in Flickr mode by selecting the option from the 'My Flickr Photos' section of the Flickr dialog. So no more dodgy pictures appearing on your background from your friends and family!

3515: Choose random photos of all friends in Facebook mode
FEATURE: You can now choose to see only pictures of your friends in Facebook mode. I don't know about you but whenever I chose photos from my friends I'd very rarely see anybody I know, now I'll always see pictures of my friends!

2878: Add smart size option so that photos are centred or scaled based on the size and screen resolution
FEATURE: If you opt to use a single picture per monitor and scale it to fit the screen, then you can now set a threshold under which pictures that are too small will be automatically centred.

So, for example, if a picture was 30% of the width or height of the screen then scaling it would result in a pretty blurry, pixelated desktop. In this case the picture would be automatically centred instead.

You can enable this option from the 'Picture Handling' section of 'More Settings.

2888: Add an option to use the 'Original' pictures in smugmug mode
FEATURE: You can now choose to 'Always use Original SmugMug photos for full screen pictures' on the 'Picture Sources' of 'More Settings'. So if you have a large monitor and want to use the biggest possible pictures from SmugMug, then this is the option for you.

3970: Lower the minimum switching interval to 30 seconds and simplify the interval options
FEATURE: I've lowered the minimum switching time and changed the free-form text field to be a pre-defined list of switching intervals from 30 seconds to 7 days.

2866: Allow mult-select on the 'Never Show Again' dialogs
FEATURE: Now when you choose 'Never Show Again' from the notification icon menu and you're either using one of the montage modes, or are using multiple monitors with different backgrounds on each or both, then when you're presented with a dialog to choose which picture to ignore, you can now select as many of the pictures as you like. Just shift or ctrl+click to multi-select the pictures in the normal way.

2301: Add textured background option to snapshot scrapbooks
FEATURE: You can now optionally have snapshot scrapbook images with a wood panelled background effect or a cork board. It's pretty cool and retro and you'll find them on the 'Montages' section of 'More Settings'. It's like having your photos stuck on a real notice board!

3708: Support Bing image searches
FEATURE: You can use Bing image searche results as your background images and can specify exact picture sizes to use along with the search queries of your choice.

1451: Extend flickr user search to include user ID
FEATURE: When choosing photos from a particular Flickr user you can now use their user ID in addition to their user name or email address to find them. This makes life easier when you're struggling to figure out the user name from their real name!

1462: Make the size of the text on snapshot scrapbook photos dynamic
FEATURE: Previously if you were using the polaroid snapshot scrapbook option and the title of the picture was too long to fit onto the polaroid it was cut off. Now the text is shrunk to make sure it fits in its entirety.

2360: Add an option to pick a random display mode (i.e. postcard pile, scale, mosaic, etc)
FEATURE: You can now have JBS pick a random display mode for you every time the background changes. So you might have a postcard pile, a thumbnail mosaic background, or even - gasp - a single picture on your background. You won't know what's coming next! Just choose the random display mode option from the settings dialog (it's the one with the rolling dice).

1774: Add the option to define borders on the screen to not draw the background (like under a sidebar or the taskbar)
FEATURE: You can now define 'no draw zones' where the background won't be drawn. You can use this to ensure you can always see your desktop icons and can find it on the 'No Draw Zone' section of 'More Settings'.

1753: Integrate Webshots photos with JBS
FEATURE: You can now choose your Webshots photos for your background. Just enter your user name and password and you'll be able to pick random photos or photos from your specific albums.

2169: Add the ability to exclude certain folders in 'Folders' mode
FEATURE: You can now optionally exclude folders of photos from selection when you've added one or more folders of photos. You can add exclusion folders from the 'Picture Sources' section of the 'More Settings' dialog.

2129: Add spaces.live.com integration to JBS
FEATURE: You can now add an RSS photo feed from any spaces.live.com photo album to JBS and it will let you choose photos from that album. When on an album page just click the 'More' link at the top, then 'RSS Feed' and copy the URL from your address bar, paste that into the 'Add' > 'RSS photo feed' section of the settings dialog in JBS and you're done!

2143: Add the option to search for Flickr tags using "all" as well as "any" (which is the default)
FEATURE: When you choose photos from Flickr by tag(s) you can now decide if you want to search for ALL tags or ANY tags from those you provide. Previously JBS would always search for ANY tags, now you can decide!

2069: Add 'show pictures with [person's name] in them' to Facebook
FEATURE: You can now choose to see photos of any particular one of your Facebook friends (as well as photos of yourself of course).

1806: Add captions to snapshot scrapbook postcard mode
FEATURE: You can now choose to see captions drawn on postcards when using that montage option. You can choose to turn this on from the 'Montages' section of 'More Settings'.

1219: Allow someone else's private Picasa albums to be chosen from using a private URL
FEATURE: If a friend sends you a private URL to access their Picasa Web Album then you can now paste that into the 'Add / Edit Picasa Photos' dialog and use those photos for your backgrounds.

1269: Use a drop-shadow effect on image thumbnails in the Cached Picture Browser dialog and anywhere else it's used
FEATURE: I thought I might as well make the image thumbnails shown throughout the system (including the 'Cached Picture Browser') look a bit nicer. Since Vista shows drop shadows, I thought I'd make JBS do the same - just so long as you have themes enabled in Windows.

614: Add the option to show the dates pictures were taken on in the picture info
FEATURE: If the date a picture was taken is available, it will now be shown along with the title (if available) and the owner of the picture (again, if that information is available). You can of course turn this option off from 'More Settings'.

1524: Add the option to detect monitor orientation and select pictures that fit
FEATURE: If you have multiple monitors and one is landscape while the other is portrait, then you can now choose 'Try to match pictures to monitor orientation' on the 'Picture Handling' section of 'More Settings'. This will ensure that if you use a single picture per monitor then pictures will be chosen according to the orientation of that screen.

In short, with this option selected JBS will try to use landscape pictures on landscape-orientated monitors and portrait pictures on portrait-orientated monitors.

767: Add more hotkeys for commonly used commands
FEATURE: You can now set shortcuts to clear the background, show the settings dialog and view the current picture(s). These can be configured on the 'More Settings' dialog. So if you quickly want to clear your desktop, just hit Ctrl+Alt+C or you want the settings up hit Ctrl+Alt+S. These are both particularly useful if you've opted to hid the notification icon and still want to control JBS.

1608: Add a preview thumbnail to the friends list in the Facebook dialog when you click on their name
FEATURE: When you choose photos from one of your Facebook friends, you'll see their profile picture next to their name in the Facebook dialog - that way you can make sure you've picked the right John Smith!

3732: Allow individual montage pictures to be bookmarked with delicious
FEATURE: If a montage picture is currently showing and you want to bookmark one of them on delicious (and the pictures displayed were downloaded from the web) then you'll now be shown all the pictures and can choose the one you're interested in.

2780: Add the option to download full-sized pictures for all modes as well as Flickr
FEATURE: There is now an option to save all full-sized downloaded files to a specified folder, previously this was only an option in Flickr mode. This option will still only work for full-size pictures and not any of the montage options (those pictures are cached and available via 'Cached Picture Browser' on the notification icon menu).

You can access this new functionality from the 'Picture Sources' section of the 'More Settings' dialog.

1415: Put options into the 'More Settings' dialog to control the cache settings
FEATURE: You can now set the length of time you'd like to cache montage pictures and picture lists in the new 'Picture Handling' section of 'More Settings'. If the montage cache is long then more space will be taken up with downloaded pictures, but if you set it short then a lot less space will be used. If you change your background frequently and have lots of drive space, keep the number high!

The photo list timeout on the other hand is how long, for example, a call to Flickr to get your photos is cached for. So if you change your photos frequently, keep the duration short, if you're not so bothered and want to cut down on calls to the internet from JBS, keep it long!

Enhancements / Bug Fixes

3929: JBS tiles the background when running on very high resolution Vista machines
FIXED: This one had me stumped for quite a while as JBS wasn't reading the correct monitor size from Windows, however this has now been fixed and you won't come across this problem again!

1448: Speed up the thumbnail generation in the cached picture browser
CHANGED: The 'Cached Picture Browser' dialog is a useful place to see cached pictures used for recent montages, but it was very slow to populate if you had a lot of pictures. Now it's almost instantaneous and will load thumbnails in the background as you scroll through the pictures.

3715: When importing settings, run the upgrader over the settings
FIXED: If you imported an older version of your exported settings from a previous version of JBS, then the upgrade tasks (that would ensure the settings were correctly imported) wasn't run against the imported settings. This could result in some options being forgotten. Now JBS deals with imported settings the same way as if you were upgrading JBS - it makes sure all your options are preserved.

3794: Simplify the cached picture browser
CHANGED: The 'Cached Picture Browser' dialog was getting a bit large and cluttered with more buttons than was necessary. Now it's been greatly simplified. You pick the picture cache you want to view from a drop-down list, then you view them. Easy!

3712: Change references to 'tray icon' to the correct 'notification icon'
CHANGED: Like many people I always refer to the little area down by the clock as the 'system tray' and the icons as 'tray icons'. This is incorrect so from now on I've changed all references in JBS to talk about the 'notification icon' that controls JBS, instead of the 'tray icon'. Hopefully that will cut down on some confusion!

3733: Ignore the minimum size limit for snapshot scrapbooks
CHANGED: When using a snapshot scrapbook as a background, the minimum picture size would come into play. Since the snapshots don't need to be large this didn't make sense so the limit is no longer applied.

3297: Transparent images are rendered with black blocks
FIXED: If you were using a single image per monitor and chose a transparent PNG as a background, then it could be rendered with annoying black blocks where the transparency should be. This has now been fixed.

3290: Change 'only show pictures larger than __ pixels' to look at the smallest dimension
CHANGED: It was always a bit confusing that this option would look at the largest dimension of a picture before rejecting it as being too small, but now it looks at the smallest dimension.

3973: Rename 'Scale pictures to FULL screen' to 'Scale and crop to FULL screen' so it's less confusing
CHANGED: This option always caused confusion, so hopefully a more clear name will reduce that being the case!

3683: If a photo isn't available (such as those from a Google image search) then don't fail and pop up an error, just try another
FIXED: The only thing more annoying than a picture not being available from the web (such as from Google, Yahoo! or RSS Feeds) when you're switching your background is JBS popping up a message telling you so instead of it just trying to use another one. Now it will do exactly that and not annoy you, unless the reason it couldn't get the picture was that your internet connection is down - in that case it'll still pop up the error.

3706: Rename 'Picture Browser' to 'Cached Picture Browser'
CHANGED: I've renamed the 'Picture Browser' to be the 'Cached Picture Browser'. Since it now exclusively shows you the contents of each photo source's cache folders, I thought it made sense to give it a more specific name.

3717: Clear up the confusion about the 'General' background effect and the montage background effect
CHANGED: Since you can apply an effect (like grayscale) the background of a snapshot scrapbook image, and also apply an effect to the background as a whole, it was rather confusing to see two drop down lists in two different places for the effect to apply. Now I'm using an image drop down list for each that shows a thumbnail of what you'll be getting - so for the snapshot scrapbook background option you can see that the snapshots themselves remain the same but the background changes, and the overall background effect drop down list shows that everything changes. When you see it you'll understand what's going on!

2863: Get picture size information from Flickr by passing o_dims in as an extras parameter
CHANGED: To cut down on the number of calls to Flickr, it's possible when getting a photo list to ask for the dimensions of photos up front. So where possible JBS now does this meaning it doesn't need to query for each individual picture's dimensions. The bottom line is it'll cut down on network calls and speed up Flickr mode in JBS!

3349: Remove Phanfare 1.0 from the GUI completely, it's dead
FIXED: Phanfare 1.0 was deprecated some time ago so JBS no longer supports its functionality - long live Phanfare 2.0 (which of course JBS does still support)!

3846: If you 'centre' a picture and it's far too big for the screen, then scale it to fit instead of only seeing a small part of it
CHANGED: If you chose to 'Centre' a picture on screen and the picture itself is way larger that the screen, then you'd end up just seeing the small portion of the picture that fits. Now JBS will automatically scale the picture to completely fit the screen instead.

1478: 'Only show pictures larger than...' is ignored in montage modes and shouldn't be
FIXED: Snapshot scrapbook and 4-picture montages now respect the minimum picture size you've set in 'More Settings' so that smaller pictures are no longer used.

2557: Show picture information in 'Folders' mode
FIXED: Photo information is now shown on the screen in 'Pictures' and 'Folders' mode if that option is enabled in 'More Settings'. This makes it consistent with all other photo sources.

3384: Don't auto-prune folders that don't exist, they may just be on a disconnected drive
CHANGED: JBS used to remove folders from its list when you brought up the settings dialog of it found the folders were no longer there. This was annoying if your pictures were on a disconnected network drive and would be available again later so now JBS just leaves the folders on the list, even if they're not there. When it comes time to switch JBS will simply ignore any folders that are no longer present.

3099: Allow the mosaic tile size to be set exactly (i.e. don't step the sizes by 10 pixels)
CHANGED: You can now choose the exact mosaic tile size from the 'Montages' section of 'More Settings'. So if you want to choose the mosaics precisely so they exactly fit your screen, then now you can!

1609: Facebook mode ignores the portrait / landscape-only options and it shouldn't
FIXED: Photos from Facebook photos will now respect the portait-only or landscape-only options that you've set in 'More Settings'.

3036: Crash when culling expired downloaded pictures
FIXED: It was possible if a virus scanner or the file system locked a temporary downloaded file while it was being deleted (when the cache had expired). This is no longer the case.

2892: Crash when creating a snapshot scrapbook background
FIXED: If one of the cached images used to generate a snapshot scrapbook is deleted at an inopportune time, JBS would crash. Now it check and removes any pictures that don't exist prior to generating the scrapbook.

2961: Crash when a popup notification window appears
FIXED: It was possible under rare conditions for the popup notifier in JBS to crash JBS. Clearly this was less than ideal so it will no longer happen.

2883: Crash when the crash handler comes up
FIXED: So JBS has crashed, that's not good news. But when the crash dialog comes up to let you report the crash and that crashes too, then you're in a world of hurt! Fortunately the crash handler should no longer crash as a result of the fix for this bug. How embarrassing!

3901: Crash when getting a Facebook user's information when they don't have a surname
FIXED: If you attempted to select from a list of Facebook users and one of the users didn't have a surname then JBS would fall over. This has now been corrected.

3042: Crash when generating a snapshot scrapbook using corrupt images
FIXED: If there were corrupt images used when generating a snapshot scrapbook then JBS could crash. This problem has now been corrected.

3848: Crash when attempting to download pictures from a URL that isn't a valid URL
FIXED: If an invalid URL (in that it's not a URL at all) was found in an RSS feed (for example) and JBS tried to download a picture from it, then JBS would crash. This is no longer the case.

3132: Crash when downloading a picture and a virus scanner decides to lock the temporary file created
FIXED: Oh how I hate virus scanners. They're supposed to protect you from viruses but as a developer they just pop up and do unpredictable things at unpredictable times. Anyway, as the description says, in this case JBS would crash, now it doesn't. Hooray!

3273: Crash when getting photos from Facebook and some photo information is missing
FIXED: On very rare occasions Facebook wouldn't return complete photo information and this would cause JBS to fall over. Now it deals gracefully with this happening.

3550: RSS Feeds mode 'Never Show Again' doesn't seem to work in montage modes
FIXED: 'Never Show Again' did work in RSS Feeds mode, but wouldn't take effect until the photo cache was cleared. Now it works properly every time.

3714: "Input string was not in correct format" error in Flickr mode
FIXED: Some Flickr searches that returned no results would case this error due to a bug parsing the XML Flickr returns. This has now been corrected.

3331: Refresh background on startup not working
FIXED: The option to refresh the background when JBS start was broken in version 3.6 and has now been fixed.

2849: Use a single background colour when using one picture across multiple monitors
FIXED: If you were stretching one picture across all monitors (and weren't making them fit the full screen) then multiple colours would be used (one for each monitor) instead of just the one automatically determined one. This has now been corrected.

2048: Cut off pictures sometimes show up in snapshot scrapbook mode
FIXED: Sometimes snapshot scrapbook images would be half cut off, as though they were corrupted during download. Now, in the event that this happens the picture will be deleted and not shown.

3033: Crash when opening the Picasa authentication dialog
FIXED: In rare cases it was possible to crash JBS when opening the Picasa authentication dialog - this problem has now been corrected.

4016: Stop the picture information from appearing under the taskbar if it's docked to the right of the screen
FIXED: If you docked your taskbar on the right of the screen then the picture information would be hidden underneath. Now it is correctly indented so you can always see it (like the calendar does).

4056: Auto-start, switch and exit option creates an invalid registry key and fails to auto-start
FIXED: If you opted to auto-start JBS and exit, then the registry key created to do the auto-starting would have too many quote characters in the path to run. This was fine on some machines and failed to work on others and has now been corrected.

4074: Make the day label on the calendar better in non-English languages
FIXED: The day header on the calendar was the first letter of the day in the local language, which was fine in English - M T W T F S S, but didn't work very well in languages like Chinese. So instead JBS uses the standard shortened day format for the given language on your system, like Mon Tue Wed... in English.

Go and download John's Background Switcher now!

John Conners on "John's Background Switcher 3.6.1 Release Notes"

John Conners — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 11:38:36 +0000

To coincide with the new site-based functionality offered in Phanfare I've released a new build of JBS - version 3.6.1 - that supports this change.

Since JBS 4.0 is only weeks away and 3.6.1 only adds this functionality specific to Phanfare users I've not issued a 'New version available' notice to existing 3.6 users. But if you're a Phanfare user then download 3.6.1 now and install it over your current version!

John Conners on "Featured Picasa Web Album photo feed - very cool"

John Conners — Wed, 15 Apr 2009 10:16:11 +0000

There's a new page that archives all the photos that have been featured on Picasa Web Albums.

You can use this feed in 'RSS Feeds' mode in JBS by adding the following URL to your list:

http://picasaweb.google.com/data/feed/base/featured?alt=rss&kind=photo&access=public&hl=en_US

There are loads of cool pictures there and is a nice alternative to Flickr's explore section.

John Conners on "Using Google Image Search results in John's Background Switcher"

John Conners — Fri, 30 Jan 2009 12:17:32 +0000

Neil Ennis has written a service that lets you get a MediaRSS feed for a Google Image Search result called ObSrv. The really cool thing about that is you can use the 'RSS Feeds' mode in JBS to consume this output and basically use Google image search results in John's Background Switcher!

You can read all about ObSrv here:

http://techmusings.blogspot.com/2009/01/watching-world.html

The bottom line is you put your search query into the following page:

http://obsrv.com/

click 'Go' and copy the URL you're given, then paste it into the 'Add / Edit RSS Feed' window in 'RSS Feeds' mode in JBS and you're up and running!

You can use all the search parameters Google Image Search supports like 'site:www.mysite.com' to restrict searches to a specific site and 'imagesize:1280x1024' to choose images of a specific size.

Great work Neil! :)

John Conners on "Fix for LolCats RSS feed showing the same happy cat picture all the time"

John Conners — Thu, 06 Nov 2008 09:44:09 +0000

If you've installed John's Background Switcher 3.6 and are using the LolCats feed I recommended in this post - then you'll notice that a recent change to the feed itself means JBS keeps using the same smiling cat picture over and over again.

I've released a new build of JBS 3.6 so if you come across this problem then go to the download page and download the installer again. To make sure you have the fix, go to the 'More Settings' dialog from the 'Settings' dialog, click 'About' and have a look at the version string on the page. The original 3.6 release was 3.6.0.28 and the version with the LolCats fix is 3.6.0.32.

Since the problem only affects the small number of users subscribing to the LolCats feed I didn't see the point of sending out a notification to all JBS users.

Thanks to Patrick for spotting this one!

John Conners on "John's Background Switcher 3.6 Release Notes"

John Conners — Sun, 26 Oct 2008 11:22:53 +0000

The main big new feature for John's Background Switcher 3.6 is RSS feed support. Any photo site that support RSS feeds can now be used as a photo source for JBS. Popular sites like DeviantArt, Photobucket and Zooomr (to name a few) expose RSS feeds so there’s no excuse for not using your favourite pictures on your desktop! Read more about RSS feed support on this release announcement.

There are also a host of other bug fixes and some much-requested features which you can see below.

New Features

1278: Add the option to shuffle all photos in ‘Folders’ mode so you don’t see the same picture again until they’ve all been shown
FEATURE: If you’re using a single-picture background in ‘Folders’ mode you can optionally choose ‘Shuffle mode’ which will make sure that all the selectable pictures will be shown before starting again - just like an MP3 player.

2366: Change the default ‘check monitor count all the time’ option to false and add it to the user interface
FEATURE: There’s now an option to ‘Constantly check for monitor count changes’ in the ‘Advanced’ section of the ‘More Settings’ dialog and the default is to disable this option. If you launch JBS, your machine is locked and you have multiple monitors, then you may find JBS thinks you have only one monitor when you unlock it. Enable this option so that JBS can keep checking how many monitors you have and prevent this from happening. Previous versions had this option on by default but in most cases it wasn’t needed.

644: Add ‘never show again’ option to tray menu
FEATURE: When in single-picture mode you can now choose to ‘Never Show Again’ from the tray menu. This will add the picture to a list of pictures that will always be ignored no matter what mode you’re in. You can review and clear this list from the ‘Never Shown’ section of the ‘More Settings’ dialog.

2707: Add the ability to set a custom background in snapshot scrapbook mode
FEATURE: You can now choose a specific picture to always use as the background for snapshot scrapbooks. You can specify the picture of choice in the ‘Montages’ section of the ‘More Settings’ dialog.

2191: Work around problem where Windows lies about monitor order
FEATURE: If your primary monitor is to the right of your secondary one (when you’re using multiple monitors) and you find that the backgrounds are showing the wrong way round, then go to the ‘Advanced’ section of the ‘More Settings’ dialog and click the ‘Work around multiple monitors being shown in the wrong order’ option. From then on you’ll find that everything should work as expected!

2024: Add the option to use one of the snapshot scrapbook images for the background
FEATURE: There is now an option ‘Use one of the snapshots as the background image’ on the ‘Montages’ section of the ‘More Settings’ dialog. Selecting it will mean that one of the snapshots shown will also be used as the background picture, otherwise a new one will be used instead.

1012: Add Media RSS / RSS support
FEATURE: You can now use pictures from any site that supports RSS feeds. Just choose ‘RSS Feeds’ from the JBS settings dialog and add the feed URLs directly! This means JBS now supports sites such as DeviantArt, Photobucket and Zooomr at long last! Check out the help file for a full explanation of how to find the relevant RSS feeds on your photo sites of choice.

2547: Add an option to automatically start, change the background and exit rather than hanging around all the time
FEATURE: There is not an option on the ‘More Settings’ dialog called ‘On start-up change the background then exit’. If this option is enabled in conjunction with ‘Start automatically when starting Windows’ then when you log onto your machine JBS will start, change the background once and exit, thereby not sitting in the background hogging memory.

2590: Copy the link to the clipboard if shift is held down when selecting ‘View Current Image’
FEATURE: If you hold down the ‘Shift’ key when selecting to view the current or previous image, the location will be copied to the clipboard instead of being launched directly.

2577: Add a ‘Soften Colours’ effect to the list of background effects available
FEATURE: There is now a ‘Soften Colours’ background effect available on the ‘More Settings’ dialog. If you choose to ‘Desaturate’ your background then a great deal of the colour is stripped out. If you find this a bit too strong then select ‘Soften Colours’ instead - it’ll tone down the colours but not to the extent of ‘Desaturate’.

2774: Add the option to choose the snapshot scrapbook background effect (which is currently grayscale)
FEATURE: You can now decide if you want to apply a specific effect to the background image used in ‘Snapshot Scrapbook’ mode. Previously it was hard-wired to Grayscale but you can now choose to not apply an effect or go for Sepia, Desaturate or Soften Colours.

2823: Add option to stop switching when running on a battery (i.e. not connected to a power outlet)
FEATURE: If you’re running on a laptop and want to stop switching when you disconnect from a power supply then select this option from the ‘Advanced’ section of the ‘More Settings’ dialog.

2713: Set some useful photo set defaults when installing JBS for the first time
FEATURE: When you install JBS for the first time or you reset to the defaults then you will be prompted to have some options set up for you. This helps when you’ve installed JBS, don’t really know how to use it and would like it to make some choices for you.

Enhancements / Bug Fixes

2763: When JBS is paused then stop switching or refreshing the background. Period!
FIXED: If you paused JBS and changed your background manually, then when your display settings changed or you rebooted then JBS would ‘helpfully’ refresh your background for you. You could stop it doing this by tweaking the settings but instead it’ll now just completely stop doing anything when paused. I should have done it this way in the first place!

2476: Show the calendar date line using the current regional settings
FIXED: Your current regional settings are now used when displaying the calendar in JBS. No more hard-wiring!

2468: Use a cryptographically secure random number generator for random numbers
CHANGED: Random selection in JBS is now a lot more random as I’m now using a cryptographically secure random number generator - meaning it’s much better!

2450: Stop mis-reporting GDI+ errors that aren’t actually GDI+ errors
FIXED: Previously some errors that weren’t actually GDI+ errors were being reported as such. This is no longer the case.

2725: Ensure that the start-up link is enclosed in quotes to prevent “Cannot Find ‘C:\Program’ or One of Its Components” errors
FIXED: This annoying state of affairs will never happen again!

2669: Constant ‘There is no current picture available for switching’ error message
FIXED: Sometimes JBS would get itself into a state where it would keep showing this error message instead of switching. This problem has now been corrected and it should only show up when refreshing when there really isn’t a picture available to show.

2406: Fix multiple crashes caused by mysteriously corrupt Arial fonts
FIXED: For some reason the ‘Arial’ font has a tendency to become corrupted on a variety of client machines out there - I have no idea why. So I’ve removed all use of that particular font throughout JBS which will cut down on a few annoying crashes people were finding.

2727: Invalid Flickr user names are accepted when the ‘OK’ button is pressed or ‘Enter’ hit in the Flickr user dialog
FIXED: If you enter an invalid user id in the Flickr dialog then previously when you clicked ‘OK’ that invalid user id would be saved. Now it isn’t, it reverts to the default of choosing photos from everyone.

2505: Crash when unable to register shortcut keys
FIXED: A rare crash turned up when attempting to register shortcut keys for JBS - this has now been fixed.

2409: Crash when generating a snapshot scrapbook with unsupported pictures in ‘Folders’ mode
FIXED: If you used unsupported image formats to generate snapshot scrapbooks locally then JBS could crash. This is no longer the case, the images will now be ignored.

2322: Crash when the current monitor count is zero
FIXED: If the current monitor count turned out to be zero for whatever reason then JBS could crash. This has now been corrected.

2591: Crash when adding a folder of photos in ‘Pictures’ mode
FIXED: Under very rare circumstances it was possible to crash JBS when adding a folder of photos in ‘Pictures’ mode. So rare in fact that it only ever happened once - but that’s one time too many for me!

2652: Crash when adding a system protected folder in ‘Folders’ mode
FIXED: This problem has now been corrected and a message box will pop up instead explaining what’s gone wrong and why.

2481: Crash when sending the current background as an email attachment
FIXED: Once you’d sent the current background as an email attachment JBS would try to delete the temporary image used for the attachment. If this file was locked then JBS would crash - now it just carries on and cleans it up later.

2388: Infrequent crash when using the ‘Change to a random mode on every switch’ option
FIXED: This problem has now been corrected.

2473: Unable to save the current background in mosaic mode
FIXED: If you attempted to choose ‘Save As’ when the current background is showing a thumbnail mosaic then you’d get an error message popping up instead of saving the background. This broken functionality has now been fixed.

2825: Crash when attempting to authenticate with Facebook
FIXED: If a problem occurred with Facebook when authenticating, JBS could crash. Now it doesn’t and tells you what happened instead!

Go and download John's Background Switcher now!

John Conners on "John's Background Switcher 3.6 Quick Start Guide"

John Conners — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 11:02:02 +0000

[This guide is copied from the John's Background Switcher help file and was written to help first-time users get to grips with how to set up JBS.]

John's Background Switcher is controlled by the Settings Dialog, which is accessed from the Tray Menu or is shown automatically the first time you launch JBS:

To get up and running as quickly as possible just follow these steps (as referenced above):

Choose where the photos you want to use are located. If you want to be very specific and only use certain pictures on your machine click 'Pictures'. If you want to use folders on your machine click 'Folders'. If you want to get your photos from Flickr click 'Flickr' and so on.
Click 'Add' to add a set of photos. This could be a folder in 'Folders' mode, a Flickr photo pool, set, pictures with certain tags, etc. in 'Flickr' mode, in 'Facebook' mode this might be photos from your friends.
Build up a list of photo sets (which could be pictures, folders, Flickr choices, etc.) - you can disable sets by un-checking the checkboxes.
Choose how you want your pictures displayed - maybe scaled to full screen, a snapshot scrapbook or a montage. See the full options by clicking here. Note that in 'Pictures' mode you can choose the display mode for each individual picture - just right-click on one or more.
Click 'OK' and JBS will start switching!

To bring the settings dialog up again just use the tray menu or double-click on a JBS shortcut!

To learn more about how to use John's Background Switcher and customise it just read the help file.

John Conners on "John's Background Switcher 3.5 Release Notes"

John Conners — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 10:05:46 +0000

Version 3.5 of John's Background Switcher builds on 3.4 and fixes some bugs and issues that cropped up after it was released (along with some others in older versions that didn't show themselves until after 3.4 was released). It's well worth installing - just run the installer on top of your existing version and it'll keep all your settings as they were (there's no need to uninstall the previous version)!

Changes

2199: Write a quick-start guide for how to use JBS the first time in
CHANGED: There is now a quick start guide in the help file to explain to first-time users how to actually use and set up John's Background Switcher. It's linked from the help home page so is easy to find and (hopefully) useful!

2175: Stop switching if the workstation is locked when the screensaver is inactive
CHANGED: If you lock your machine but don't run a screensaver then JBS would keep switching, however now if you have the 'Stop switching if the system is locked or the screensaver is running' option selected, then the act of locking your system will stop JBS from switching until you unlock it again.

1997: Change the default Flickr image count to 500
CHANGED: Instead of 250 pictures as the default number of Flickr photos to choose from when adding a new Flickr photo set I've changed it to 500. You can set any value up to 5000 but I thought it would make sense to use a more sensible default value.

2116: When first running JBS, set the desktop picture to '(None)' to avoid problems with the background picture not displaying
CHANGED: A few people reported a problem whereby they could only see the background picture JBS sets when they locked their workstation and a blank background at all other times. By setting the display manually to '(None)' the problem went away and JBS could run happily from then on. So now when you run JBS for the first ever time it'll clear the background prior to switching once. Also, when you uninstall it'll clear your background (if you tell it to clean up your personal settings).

2172: Make the uninstall feedback page optional when uninstalling JBS
CHANGED: When uninstalling JBS you now have the option to suppress the uninstallation feedback page that used to pop up so you could pass on your thoughts of JBS and why you're uninstalling. I realise it can be quite annoying (although provides a great deal of useful suggestions that have made JBS a lot better) so you now have a choice!

2170: Remember the last selected folder when adding folders in 'Folders' mode
CHANGED: When adding several folders in 'Folders' mode, the previously added folder is set as the default next time so you don't have to dig through your folder hierarchy again and again.

2149: Increase the number of recent photos chosen in Facebook mode to make it more random
CHANGED: I've upped the limits of Facebook photos to choose from to the 1000 newest photos in the 100 newest albums. This applies when you're choosing random photos from your friends.

Bug Fixes

2237: Crash when creating a snapshot scrapbook background when unable to calculate the screen size
In the rare case that the screen bounds couldn't be calculated (like when the machine was in the process of shutting down) then JBS could crash when attempting to generate a snapshot scrapbook. This is no longer the case.

2154: Photo titles show quotes as 'quot;' instead of " in smugmug mode
FIXED: Now the photo titles are shown correctly in smugmug mode. Good spot from Chris S!

2165: Auto-rotate option is broken for montages in 'Folders' mode
FIXED: If you used 'Snapshot Scrapbook' in 'Folders' mode and had pictures that needed automatically rotating, then JBS would fail to do it even if the correct EXIF information was present. This has now been corrected.

1845: Annoying popups about the CurrentThumbnailCache folder being locked
FIXED: Sometimes you'd get this warning when switching the background and it would prevent the background from changing. This problem has now been corrected.

1923: 'Invalid URI' error if you try to see your Facebook friend list when you have hundreds of friends
FIXED: If you had hundreds of Facebook friends then you'd get this error when trying to choose from one. This has now been corrected.

1941: If the calendar is on the bottom right of the screen it is obscured by the taskbar
FIXED: The calendar is now always drawn in the monitor's working area so no matter where the taskbar is you'll always be able to see the calendar (just like it used to be!).

2080: Stop Phanfare integration from starting a new session every time JBS downloads a photo
FIXED: Every time JBS switched in Phanfare mode it would start a new session which wasn't necessary. Now the session cookies are cached and renewed when they expire.

2085: Strange issue with multiple monitors and a locked workstation
FIXED: If you had multiple monitors and locked your workstation and Windows decided you had one screen instead of how many you really had, then when you unlocked it JBS would show one large picture across all your monitors until the next background change. Now JBS should refresh the background as soon as you unlock your computer.

2093: Crash when reading XML from the various web sites supported fails with a network protocol error
FIXED: It was possible that when parsing the XML returned from sites like Yahoo and Flickr the network connection to the site could go down and JBS crash. This loophole has now been closed.

1915: Crash when trying to list your Facebook friends when you don't have any
FIXED: If you tried to list your friends and had none then JBS would crash. This has now been corrected.

1973: Crash when attempting to refresh the background
FIXED: Yet another case of a virus scanner or indexing service locking a JBS temporary file when it shouldn't. Sigh. JBS will now fail to change the background in this case and let you know with an annoying popup message (which you can turn off from the 'More Settings' dialog)! ;-)

1984: Crash when the system is out of memory
FIXED: There was a loophole where if the system ran out of memory JBS would crash, now it gracefully exits and alerts you to the fact that you're out of memory and should close some programs down.

1966: Crash when you click 'F1' when the popup message is showing
FIXED: A daft one really and has been there for several version but was never spotted until now.

1709: Crash when attempting to set the Flickr download folder to an incomplete path
FIXED: If you managed to set an invalid path for your Flickr download folder then JBS would crash. Now it doesn't, it just tells you that you've entered an invalid path.

2044: Crash when cleaning up orphaned cached files
FIXED: Riddle me this... JBS creates some temporary files and later deletes them. However when it deletes them it crashes as the files it created have invalid file names. So how come it managed to create them in the first place I hear you ask? Good question! But rather than bore you with the answer I've fixed the problem and the crash instead! :)

1943: Crash when attempting to show a popup message
FIXED: This was a strange one - for some reason access to the popup message handler could be denied when trying to show a message. This crash only occurred once but once is enough!

1988: Crash when Yahoo! doesn't return the dimensions of a picture correctly
FIXED: Very rarely Yahoo! wouldn't set the width and height of the given picture in the XML it returned to JBS and this caused JBS to crash. No longer!

1933: Crash when the main settings file is locked by a virus scanner or Windows in general
FIXED: JBS stores all its settings in a file called - imaginatively - settings.xml. Should that file become locked by a virus scanner or some other process then JBS has a really hard time reading its settings. Previously it would crash, now it just waits a while and tries again. It does this 4 times and if it still can't access it JBS will fall over. To see how often this happens (indicating that something is quite wrong) please click 'Send' on the crash dialog should it happen (although I'm thinking it most likely won't).

1940: Crash when culling expired cached files
FIXED: In a similar way to case 2044 JBS could crash when cleaning up its cache folders when something locked some of them (I'll take a wild guess at it being a virus scanner or search indexer). This will no longer happen.

1812: Crash when adding an invalid folder in 'Folders' mode
FIXED: Much like case 1709 if you managed to select an invalid path while adding a folder in 'Folders' mode then JBS would crash. This is no longer the case.

1889: Crash when attempting to clear the background
FIXED: Under very strange circumstances JBS could crash when you cleared the background. Now it won't, it'll merely fail to clear the background.

2064: Fix the case on the 'picture browser' buttons
FIXED: Call me pedantic if you like but the mix of title case and lower case on the 'Picture Browser' buttons annoyed me. So I've made them consistent.

2086: Crash when downloading a picture from Picasa to a temporary file and that file gets locked by a virus scanner
FIXED: Rather than repeat this unfortunate set of circumstances I'll just say that it's fixed!

1602: Crash when going back to the previous background
FIXED: It may have only happened once, but that's more than enough for me to want to fix it! When going to the previous picture the thumbnail cache folders were getting locked by a virus scanner - should this happen again then JBS will deal with it.

John Conners on "A fix for a 'Request-URI Too Large' bug in Facebook mode"

John Conners — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 21:28:20 +0000

If you try to choose a specific friend from your friend list in Facebook mode and you happen to have hundreds of friends, then you'll be presented with a message box informing you - rather unhelpfully - that your request URI is too large. This is a bug in JBS 3.4 and if you come across it and want a fix, download the following slightly newer build of version 3.4:

http://www.johnsadventures.com/downloads/SwitcherSetup3.4.0.27.exe

The official release of version 3.4 is build 3.4.0.26 and this is the only change in build 27. You can run this installer without uninstalling your existing version and all your settings will be preserved.

I'll most likely release a version 3.5 that fixes this and any other bugs that crop up over the coming weeks. (Oh, and thanks to Matt for reporting this one!).

John Conners on "John's Background Switcher 3.4 Release Notes"

John Conners — Sun, 15 Jun 2008 10:34:39 +0000

Version 3.4 of John's Background Switcher contains a some bug fixes and several cool new features I thought were worth releasing in the time between 3.3 and 4. The coolest new features are in the 'Montages' section of the 'More Settings' dialog - make that your first port of call and don't say I'm not good to you! The next is Facebook integration, so now you can choose your photos from all of your friends! See also this release announcement including screenshots of some of the best new features.

New Features

1275: Add Facebook to the list of photo sources
FEATURE: You can now choose photos from Facebook! This means you can use pictures from your own Facebook albums, those of your friends and any photos that you're tagged in. All you have to do is follow the instructions in Facebook mode and you'll be up and running in no time.

395: Add option to use more than one mode at a time
FEATURE: There is now an option on the 'Advanced' section of the 'More Settings' dialog titled 'Change to a random mode on every switch'. When this is checked then prior to every switch JBS will change to a random valid mode (i.e. it has some photo sets defined). This means you no longer have to open the settings dialog to choose photos from another source.

1548: Add the option to choose the thumbnail mosaic image size
FEATURE: There is now an option on the 'Montages' section of the 'More Settings' dialog to change the size of the thumbnail mosaic photo tiles.

690: Add 'show only portrait photos' option
FEATURE: You can now choose pictures that are portrait-orientated as well as landscape-orientated (or both of course). There's now a combo box on the 'General' section of the 'More Settings' dialog where you can make this choice.

1220: Add a button to the 'More Settings' dialog to open the application data folder where the settings live
FEATURE: There is now a button on the 'Import / Export' section of the 'More Settings' dialog to open the settings folder. This folder contains the settings and status files, the current background image and any log files.

1773: Add 'Select All' to the 'Pictures' context menu
FEATURE: You can now right-click the 'Pictures' list and 'Select All' the pictures at once. Saves on mouse clicks!

1582: If the shift key is held down when double-clicking a photo in the picture browser dialog, copy the location to the clipboard
FEATURE: In the 'Picture Browser' you can double-click thumbnails to go to the original picture be it on the web or on your computer. If you hold down the Shift key when double-clicking it'll copy the location to the Clipboard instead - useful if you want to use the URL for something else.

1429: Add a setting to choose the snapshot scrapbook photo size
FEATURE: You can now change the size of the snapshots in 'Snapshot Scrapbook' mode. This means you can have lots of small pictures or a few larger ones and is pretty cool. The 'Montages' section of the 'More Settings' dialog lets you change this option.

1567: Add snapshot scrapbook option to not force the photos to be square and cropped
FEATURE: You can now choose whether to show snapshot scrapbook photos as the previous 'Polaroid' look or the new 'Postcard' look. This option is on the 'Montages' section of the 'More Settings' dialog.

1547: Add the option to suppress the titles on snapshot scrapbook photos
FEATURE: You can now suppress the photo captions on snapshot scrapbooks. The option is on the 'Montages' section of the 'Advanced Settings' dialog.

1540: Add the option to log all popup messages to a file
FEATURE: There is now an option on the 'Advanced' section of the 'More Settings' dialog called 'Log all popup messages to the Settings folder (see Import / Export)' that will create a log file of every popup message. This is useful if you're getting a lot of annoying messages and want to tell me what they are (so I can help figure out what the problem is).

You can open the settings folder where the log file is stored from the 'Import / Export' section of the 'More Settings' dialog.

1577: If you launch JBS while it's already running then show the settings dialog
FEATURE: If you have JBS running and try to launch it again, you're now prompted if you want to open the settings dialog. This is useful if you don't want to use the tray icon to launch the settings. You can disable the option or make it silently launch the settings by looking on the 'Advanced' section of the 'More Settings' dialog.

1552: Add an option to show the calendar on all screens (not just the primary one)
FEATURE: You can now choose to show the calendar on all screens, rather than just the primary one. This option is available on the 'General' section of the 'More Settings' dialog.

440: Change the windows desktop background color according to a random sampling of the color from the current photo
FEATURE: You can now let JBS choose the border colour of backgrounds for you. If you click the 'border colour' button on the settings dialog you'll see a menu pops up to let you pick a particular colour or select an automatic colour. The default is now to use an automatic colour and it examines the current picture(s) and chooses a colour that will blend in nicely with that.

Enhancements / Bug Fixes

1642: Fix the 'Generic GDI+' error once and for all
FIXED: The long-standing GDI+ problem has now been fixed! .NET's handling of saving pictures with higher bit rates than standard bitmaps was shoddy at best so I've worked around this weakness.

1656: Launching JBS on a locked workstation makes JBS think there's only one monitor when there are more
FIXED: If you started up JBS when your machine was locked (by using a startup script for example) and were running with multiple monitors, then JBS would incorrectly believe that you had only one monitor attached. Only exiting and re-starting JBS would correct this. Now JBS will recount the number of monitors each time it switches the background to prevent this from happening.

1518: If auto-rotating doesn't work, just use the picture, don't ignore it
CHANGED: If auto-rotating was enabled (from the 'Advanced' section of the 'More Settings' dialog) in 'Folders' mode and a picture was found with dodgy EXIF data (that's the information in the picture that contains rotation information) then the picture was ignored completely. Now instead the picture is used, just not rotated, which is much more sensible. This was the cause of a lot of pictures never being shown in 'Folders' mode.

1791: Add shorter retention time to the Flickr download folder cache
CHANGED: You can now opt to save full-sized downloaded Flickr photos for 1 day, 1 week and 2 weeks in addition to 1 month, 3 months, 6 months and forever. Note that this feature is disabled for montage modes since they are stored in a different cache that you can access via the Picture Browser Dialog from the tray icon menu.

1780: Show a balloon tooltip to point out where the tray icon that controls JBS is when running for the first time
CHANGED: When you install JBS and run it for the first time, a balloon tip appears above the tray icon to show you where it is. It's amazing how many people missed it despite it being on the download page. Now there's no excuse!

1802: Support .tif files (in addition to .tiff files which are already supported)
FIXED: While .tiff files were supported, .tif files were ignored. This has now been corrected and both are now handled correctly.

1527: Add the option to choose from your public albums only instead of from all in Phanfare mode
CHANGED: To match the behaviour of the Phanfare screensaver JBS now only chooses photos from your public Phanfare albums unless you explicitly choose the album from your list. This was causing confusion as the expectation was that when choosing random photos from your collection the private ones would not be shown. Mea culpa!

1611: Stop caching full sized pictures in folders mode - it's a waste of disk space
FIXED: If you were using one of the montage options (such as Snapshot Scrapbook) in 'Folders' mode, then the full sized pictures you selected were being cached. This not only quickly filled up disk space but slowed down the switching process in general. Now only quarter-screen versions of the photos are cached making for faster switching and less hard drive wastage.

1330: Make 'use one picture for the whole desktop' fill all screens when in montage modes (eg. snapshot scrapbook)
CHANGED: If you 'Use one picture for the whole desktop' and one of the montage modes (like Snapshot Scrapbook) then you'll notice that it didn't fill all your monitors. Now it does - the whole of your 'virtual' desktop space is used to create a giant snapshot scrapbook. Very cool if you have multiple monitors.

1541: Landscape-only mode is ignored in 'Folders' mode when creating montage backgrounds
FIXED: If you had selected 'Only use landscape-orientated pictures' from the 'More Settings' dialog and were using one of the montage modes in 'Folders' mode, then portrait pictures would be shown when they shouldn't. This has now been corrected.

1572: Change the default version of Phanfare to be v2
CHANGED: Since Phanfare 2 has been around for a while I've changed the default for JBS to use that version (although you can change it in the Phanfare settings to v1 if you're still using the old one). Existing settings are not affected.

1633: Make sure cancelling works when building up the list of pictures in Folders mode
FIXED: If you cancelled during switching in Folders mode, then it could take ages to actually cancel - even longer in thumbnail mosaic mode. Now cancelling will have a much quicker effect and actually cancel switching ASAP.

1636: Only choose non-hidden pictures in 'Folders' mode
FIXED: Hidden pictures are no longer chosen for selection in 'Folders' mode. Macs leave hidden files around that aren't actually images but could be named as such, so they will now be ignored (as they should be, they're hidden after all).

1697: Change the 'Show photo info on the photo' checkbox to make more sense
CHANGED: It now reads 'Show picture info on the top-right corner of the screen', which should make its meaning more obvious.

1124: In snapshot scrapbook mode, don't use the background image as one of the snapshots
CHANGED: If you opt to have a background picture in snapshot scrapbook mode (which is the default) it's no longer taken from one of the displayed pictures. This stops the same picture appearing twice. (Better late than never Rosie!).

1534: Increase the maximum concurrent downloads thread limit
CHANGED: The maximum number of concurrent download threads JBS uses has now been upped to 10 from 5, although the default is still 4. If you haven't changed this value yourself (which I would recommend against) then don't give it a second thought!

1666: Prefix popup messages with the current mode for clarity
CHANGED: When an error occurs during switching the active mode is now added to the title of the resulting popup message. Since there is now the option to pick a random mode it helps to know what mode you're using when a switching problem occurs.

1673: Using captions from picasa rather than the photo title
CHANGED: Picasa photo titles now use the caption (if it's set) rather than the name of the file. If there is no caption then it'll use the name as before.

1557: Create a separate page in the help for each section in the 'More Settings' dialog
CHANGED: Each section of the 'More Settings' dialog now has its own page in the help file. So when you click the help button and you're on the 'Advanced' section, then that page will show up in the help and so on. Should make finding explanations for options easier to find.

1556: Crash when storing thumbnail images
FIXED: There was a small hole whereby JBS could crash when storing thumbnails once they'd been downloaded. This loophole has now been closed.

1639: Crash when Yahoo! returns invalid XML for a search
FIXED: Yahoo would, on occasion, return invalidly formatted XML, and JBS didn't like that. Now JBS deals with such problems with aplomb!

1496: Repeated crashes when invalid text gets set as the switching interval
FIXED: If some stray text manage to find its way into the interval value in the settings file, it would cause repeated crashes that were quite annoying. This problem has now been corrected.

1519: Crash when attempting to download an unavailable Smugmug photo
FIXED: Then a Smugmug photo was not available for download JBS would crash, now it just carries on regardless.

1480: Crash when cleaning up temporary files and a cyclic redundancy check fails
FIXED: Whenever JBS cleans up temporary files it culls any files it doesn't expect to be there. If an unexpected error occurred (such as the mysterious CRC failure) then JBS would crash - now it just carries on regardless.

1535: Crash when cleaning up temporary files and a file is locked by a virus scanner
FIXED: If JBS was cleaning up some of its temporary files and a virus scanner was misbehaving, then it could crash. This is no longer the case.

1538: Crash when using Google Picasa Web Albums mode
FIXED: Google made a breaking change to their public API meaning that JBS could no longer choose photos from Picasa. While they have now fixed their bug I thought it prudent to improve JBS to handle this sort of thing in future.

John Conners on "How to find the original picture from a snapshot scrapbook"

John Conners — Thu, 07 Feb 2008 10:36:38 +0000

An oft-requested feature is that when you see a photo you like on a montage background (such as snapshot scrapbook), it would be cool to be able to find the original - be it on your machine, Flickr or wherever. The good news is that this feature has been in John's Background Switcher for the past few versions - it's just easily missed!

If you select 'Picture Browser' from the tray menu then you can look at all the photos that JBS has in its cache for each mode, along with the 'Current Background Tiles' as you can see below:

It'll show you thumbnails of all the pictures that make up the current montage and if you double-click on one it'll take you to the original location (if it's on your machine it'll view it and if it's from Flickr / smugmug / Phanfare, etc. it'll launch a web browser and take you to the photo page).

John Conners on "John's Background Switcher 3.3 Release Notes"

John Conners — Tue, 22 Jan 2008 12:55:38 +0000

Version 3.3 of John's Background Switcher is primarily a bug fix release and builds on 3.2 by correcting some bugs that cropped up in the new functionality implemented in that version (although there weren't many, which was pleasing). I've also added support for Phanfare 2.0 which is the latest version of the popular photo sharing site along with a couple of other highly requested new features.

New Features

1362: Add support for Phanfare 2.0

FEATURE: Phanfare have released a new version of their system which is based around logging in with your email address and password then choosing photos from your albums or your friends and family. JBS now gives you the option to choose from Phanfare 1 and / or Phanfare 2 users and fully supports the new functionality Phanfare 2 offers.

1279: When JBS is authenticated with Flickr then all calls to Flickr should be authenticated (instead of just 'My Photos' mode)

FEATURE: Previously if you authenticated JBS to your Flickr account then it would only sign calls for the 'My Photos' mode. This meant that if you chose photos from one of your contacts you'd only see their public photos, which wasn't ideal and went against what you'd expect.

Now if you authenticate JBS with Flickr then all calls to Flickr will be authenticated so it'll be like browsing Flickr when you're signed in. Should you revoke JBS from your Flickr account (which you can do from Flickr's account page) then you'll need to clear authentication from the dialog in JBS.

1313: Add a button to copy popup messages to the clipboard

FEATURE: There is now a 'Copy to clipboard' button on the popup message so that if you get a persistent problem you can copy the full content of the text and send it to me for diagnosis.

1349: Add the option to execute a command line after each switch

FEATURE: There is now an option to run a command line after each time the background has been switched. This is particularly useful if you use BgInfo to display system information over the desktop. The option is on the 'Switching' section of the 'More Settings' dialog.

Enhancements / Bug Fixes

1382: When choosing photos from Flickr, select photos from ALL active photo sets, don't just pick one from the list

CHANGED: Previously if you defined several photo sets in Flickr mode, then come switching time photos would only be chosen from one random photo set - this was in contrast to all the other modes that would get all photos from all sets and choose from the lot at random. Now Flickr follows suit so if you have one set defining photos tagged with 'fish' and another with photos tagged 'cat' then your next background would be chosen from both 'fish' and 'cat' photos. This gives a lot more variation when using the montage modes, such as snapshot scrapbook.

1239: Put the crash handler around the upgrade step of the installer

FIXED: Under certain rare circumstances it was possible to crash the upgrade section of the installer. The cause of the crash has been fixed but if anything comes up again then the main JBS crash handler will kick in allowing you to send an error report back to me so I can figure out when wrong and fix it. Just click 'Send'!

1272: Change the check for whether visual styles are active or not to use the safer .NET managed way

CHANGED: Instead of loading an external library to figure out if Windows themes are active or not I'm using the recommended way instead.

1182: The Flickr authorisation, Picasa and smugmug dialogs don't use the current web connection settings

FIXED: If you change the web connection settings in the settings dialog then you'd expect the various photo dialogs (Flickr, Picasa, smugmug, etc.) to pick up those settings but previously they didn't, they'd use the previous settings. This has now been corrected.

1228: Crash when permission to the current user's startup registry key is denied

FIXED: If you didn't have access to the 'HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run' registry key then JBS could crash while attempting to set or reset whether it should run on start up. Now it just silently fails.

1310: Crash when loading the settings and they fail to initialise properly

FIXED: I had a report of a crash when the setting failed to initialise so have put in a defensive check to deal with the situation if it happens again.

1214: Crash when swapping current background pictures and the temporary directory is locked

FIXED: No doubt caused by another poorly written virus scanner locking one of the temporary directories JBS uses. Instead of crashing JBS will try again and if this fails will now inform you of the problem via a popup message.

1222: Crash when the internet connection is lost when logging into your Google account

FIXED: When logging into Google for authenticated Picasa usage, if your internet connection went down at a particularly unfortunate moment then JBS could crash. This is no longer the case.

1254: Crash when attempting to save to a cache folder when the disk has run out of space

If the disk ran out of space when saving a cache file, then JBS would crash. But worse than that, when trying to load the file in again later on it would also crash! Now it correctly handles this problem and continues working happily.

1283: Crash when shuffling a list of photos once in a blue moon

FIXED: It was possible to cause a crash when shuffling a list of photos. This was due to a bug in the generation of random numbers that wasn't being handled correctly - the problem won't happen again!

1247: The wrong picture is sometimes shown in 'Pictures' mode when you choose it from the list

FIXED: If you deleted a picture that was on a picture list in the file system and looked at the list in the settings dialog, then the preview thumbnails would get mixed up. This has now been corrected.

1378: If you change the total number of Flickr photos to return then the cached previous list is returned, not the new one

FIXED: Say you were choosing from the top 250 photos from the last 7 days, then changed to look for the top 500 photos instead. Instead of choosing from the top 500 JBS would actually return the top 250 from the last 7 days until the photo list cache was next cleared (after 2 hours). This has now been corrected.

1400: When the Flickr token is invalid, there's no way to clear it without verifying then unverifying

CHANGED: If your Flickr authorisation is invalidated for whatever reason (maybe you've revoked it from the Flickr application page) then JBS wouldn't give you an easy way to clear the authorisation token. Now, if you bring up the Flickr authorisation dialog you'll be presented with a message explaining the situation and the token will be reset.

1384: Crash when upgrading and the settings file is locked

FIXED: If you upgraded JBS from an older version and the settings file became exclusively locked just as they're about to be saved then JBS would crash. This is no longer the case and after trying to save again, if it continues to fail a message explaining the problem is shown instead.

1406: Crash when upgrading from an old version and moving the temporary files from the roaming to the local application path

FIXED: Since the JBS temporary cache files now live in the correct place (the local temporary application path rather than the roaming one), if an older version of JBS is upgraded the files are moved. If this process was stopped halfway through (such as when there's a power cut) then the next time you ran JBS it would crash while trying to do the upgrade. This is no longer the case.

John Conners on "John's Background Switcher 3.2 Release Notes"

John Conners — Sat, 24 Nov 2007 13:06:21 +0000

Version 3.2 of John's Background Switcher contains nearly 100 new features and bug fixes and adds two new photo sources: smugmug and Google picasa web albums. It also brings a new montage mode - snapshot scrapbook - that takes a bunch of photos and throws them onto your desktop as though you'd made a scrapbook (it's rather cool if I do say so myself). There are new post-processing options, better multiple monitor support, auto-start is easier to disable, you can now email backgrounds as attachments and lots more besides. I've also improved the icons, graphics and tidied up the look and feel of the dialogs. Oh yes!

The full release notes follow:

New Features

976: Add mode that pastes photos on the background at random places over time like a scrapbook

FEATURE: There is now a 'Snapshot scrapbook' picture mode that creates an effect of a series of polaroid-style photos thrown onto your desktop. It's rather cool if I do say so myself and well worth a look! :)

966: Restrict the maximum Flickr downloaded photos folder size

FEATURE: There is now an option in Flickr mode to clean up downloaded pictures after a certain period of time. You can choose to clean them up after 1, 3 or 6 months, or never. This stops the folder getting enormous and filling up your hard drive. Note that the cleanup runs every 7 days and the first time you run it and by default downloaded pictures are kept forever.

958: Improve the crash reporting to detail the exact operating system version running

FEATURE: To aid crash report analysis the exact edition of Windows is now reported when you send a crash in. This is handy considering how many editions of Vista there are!

1106: Allow photos to be chosen from smugmug albums

FEATURE: You can now choose photos from smugmug so if you or a friend has a smugmug account you use their pictures as your background!

924: Digitally sign the application and uninstaller for Vista support

FEATURE: Windows Vista prefers applications that are digitally signed - not only the installer but the application and the uninstaller. To play along nicely with Vista I've done all of the above.

930: Add an 'Install for All Users' option to the installer

FEATURE: There is now an option on the installer called 'Install for ALL users'. If you check this option then the shortcuts for JBS will be created for all users, not just you as you're installing it. This means you can install JBS as an administrator but be able to use it as a restricted user.

769: Add post-processing options such as grayscale and semi-transparent

FEATURE: There is now the option to apply image effects to your backgrounds. From the option on the 'General' section of the 'More Settings' dialog you can choose to either grayscale, use sepia or desaturate the background. I'm sure more options will follow as time goes on!

1031: Add the option to disable photosets instead of deleting them

FEATURE: For all modes except 'Pictures' you can now decide to enable or disable individual photo sets. This means you can choose a whole bunch of options and optionally remove some from selection whenever you like. Simply check the checkbox next to a picture set to enable it and uncheck it to disable it - it's as simple as that!

1033: Add command line option to choose which monitor to set the background for

FEATURE: You can now pass in the monitor number via the command line option '/switchto' so that you can choose which monitor you want the background to be set on. So if you have 2 monitors and want the background only set on the second one, you could use the following command line:

BackgroundSwitcher.exe /switchto scale "C:\Pictures\pic.jpg" 2

The important part is the number '2' at the end. The primary monitor is '1', by the way.

1045: Add 'switch on startup' option to change the background when JBS starts

FEATURE: There's now an option on the 'Advanced' section of the 'More Settings' dialog called 'Always switch the background when starting up'. When enabled, any time you start JBS it will immediately change the background whether it's time to or not.

1117: Enable multiple Yahoo! searches to be performed in the same way that all the other modes allow

FEATURE: You can now create as many Yahoo! image searches as you like in the Yahoo! mode. When it comes time to switch the background JBS chooses photos at random from the list of search options. Cool.

1060: Add 'view previous picture' option to the tray menu

FEATURE: There is now a 'View Previous Image' item on the tray menu that lets you view the previous background if there is one available.

1110: Add icons to the 'Picture Browser' dialog buttons

FEATURE: I've added icons to the 'Picture Browser' dialog buttons so you can quickly tell which pictures you're looking at (eg. Flickr, Phanfare or local to your machine).

949: Explain how to run JBS as a scheduled task in the help file

FEATURE: I've added a page to the help file detailing how to run JBS as a scheduled task. This is handy for saving memory on your system as JBS will only run when it's switching and disappear for the rest of the time.

1029: Add option to choose which monitor(s) to show pictures on

FEATURE: There's a new multiple monitor option called 'Use a picture on one monitor only' that you can choose from the setting dialog. When selected, you can then choose which monitor you want the background set on, any other monitors attached to your machine will be left blank.

851: Make the installer remember what check-boxes you checked at the last install

FEATURE: The installer will now remember the options you selected so when you run the installer again (for a newer version or to change the options) it'll remember what you chose last time.

1132: Allow either a user's email address or user name to be entered for Flickr searches by user

FEATURE: You can now choose a Flickr user based on either their email address or user name instead of just their user name.

1164: Cancelling 'Picture Browser' with the escape key doesn't work

FEATURE: You can now press the 'Esc' key on your keyboard to close the 'Picture Browser' dialog and also while thumbnails are being generated if you wish to cancel.

627: Add a 'what's new' option to the installer

FEATURE: There's now a 'Read what's new in this version' checkbox on the final page of the installer. If you check it then you'll see a page detailing the changes to the current version of JBS that you've just installed. Read it and enjoy!

659: Make the 'send to email' feature actually send the picture as an attachment

FEATURE: You can now send your backgrounds as email attachments. Select the 'Send To >' item from the tray menu then 'Email Recipient' and a new email will be created with your background as an attachment ready to send. Previously it would just create an email with a link to the picture (which sometimes didn't work).

913: Add Picasa Web Albums as a photo source to JBS

FEATURE: You can now choose to use photos from Google Picasa Web Albums. You can either use search terms to pick from all public photos or specify which user(s) and album(s) to choose from - as well as random photos.

919: Add option to disable photo info in montage mode to folder and Phanfare modes

FEATURE: You can now opt to not show photo information on your desktop in Phanfare mode and I've turned it off for 'Monitor Folder' mode for montages since it's a bit pointless really!

Enhancements / Bug Fixes

991: Put a 'Mode' label in the top left of the settings dialog to reinforce that you're picking only one mode

CHANGED: To remove any confusion I've added a 'Current mode' label to the settings dialog to reinforce the fact that JBS only uses one mode at a time. This won't always be the case though. ;)

1014: Montages can repeat pictures on multiple monitors

FIXED: If you had two monitors, 5 pictures in a folder and used the 4-picture montage mode, then you'd find the same picture used for all 4 tiles on the second monitor. This strange behaviour has now been corrected.

1059: 'Current Background Tiles' not showing all the images that it should be

FIXED: When looking at the current background tiles in the 'Browse All Pictures' dialog, you sometimes wouldn't see all the available thumbnails. This behaviour has now been corrected.

1034: Run the upgrade code when JBS starts instead of just during an install

CHANGED: If multiple users run JBS on your computer then it makes sense to upgrade each user's settings when they run JBS. Previously the installer would upgrade the settings for the user installing it but not anybody else. This behaviour has not been changed so everybody's happy!

1052: Lots of 'GDI+' errors after installing a Microsoft update

FIXED: If you kept coming across GDI+ errors popping up frequently in 'Monitor Folder' or 'Select Pictures' mode, then worry no more, these problems have now been corrected. And it wasn't my fault!!

1080: Move the option to run JBS at startup to the 'More Settings' dialog from the installer

CHANGED: I've moved the option to choose whether or not you want JBS to start when you log in to Windows from the installer (which nobody could ever find) to the 'Advanced' section of the 'More Settings' dialog. It's a checkbox titled 'Start automatically when starting Windows'.

The installer should remove any shortcuts to JBS from your 'Startup' program group from the Start menu but if it doesn't then please delete the shortcut manually.

1076: If no photos are found but some were rejected as they were too small, say so in the error message

CHANGED: I've changed the popup error message if no photos are found to mention that pictures can be rejected for being too small. I've also changed the default minimum size to 400 pixels - but you can change it on the 'More Settings' dialog.

941: The link to flickr on the 'Flickr Mode - Overview' page of the help should open up in a separate window

FIXED: I've fixed the link to Flickr from the Flickr overview help page of the documentation so that it opens in a web browser instead of the the help file itself.

1021: Move the JBS application data away from the roaming profile folder

CHANGED: The temporary files JBS uses to cache photos and such like have been moved from the roaming profile folder to the local application folder on your machine. This means that if your roaming profile is stored on a server (such as in a corporate environment) and is restricted by size then you won't hit the limit any more. The files will be moved as soon as you start JBS. Now the only files stored in the roaming profile folder are the settings, status, connection settings and the currently active background.

1067: Improve the icons used throughout JBS and create a high-res Vista icon

CHANGED: The icons used throughout JBS were a bit inconsistent so I've incorporated some of the excellent icons designed by Mark James over at http://www.famfamfam.com. The new application icons, however, were designed entirely by me!

1115: Consolidate 'show photo info on the photo' for different modes into one place

CHANGED: Instead of each mode having it's own option to show picture information or not, I've moved the setting to the 'General' section of the 'More Settings' dialog.

1116: Move the option to only show landscape-oriented pictures to the 'More Settings' dialog

CHANGED: I've moved the various 'landscape-only' options to the 'General' section of the 'More Settings' dialog so you can change it for all modes in one place.

1069: Remove the XML serialization code from JBS - Microsoft have never made it reliable

FIXED: The number one cause of crashes in JBS up until this point have been as a result of problems with the XmlSerializer class. Since it's clearly as buggy as hell, I've removed all code using it in JBS and that should cut down the number of annoying, un-fixable crashes somewhat!

1071: Change 'Browse all Pictures' to 'Picture Browser'

CHANGED: I've renamed the 'Browse All Pictures' dialog to the much more sensible 'Picture Browser'. The functionality is exactly the same (you can see all the photos JBS has downloaded or is displaying at the current time - especially useful in mosaic or montage mode) but it should be more discoverable with a more obvious name.

1000: Ignore photos that caused a GDI+ error in folder monitor mode

FIXED: In 'Folders' mode, if JBS happened to choose a picture that would cause a GDI+ error if used, it would pop up an error message. Now it simply ignores that picture and chooses another one instead.

1133: Don't abbreviate the folder path in 'Folders' mode - there's no need to!

CHANGED: Since the settings dialog is resizable, it seemed pointless to compact the folder path in 'Folders' mode - so I'm not doing it any more! This will make it easier to see which folder is which in the list.

1165: Photo Sets context menu should disable options when nothing is selected

CHANGED: Context menus items and edit / delete buttons are now disabled for the various mode photo sets when nothing is selected. You can thank John Topley's attention to detail for that one!

997: Crash when switching and a virus scanner decides to lock a temporary file

FIXED: When JBS checked to see if there was EXIF information present in a picture (so it could be auto-rotated), if a virus scanner locked the temporary file used and denied all access to it, JBS could crash. This has now been corrected. And I really dislike virus scanners - they're supposed to be transparent and not break other people's software!

998: Crash when invalid values are entered in the 'Interval' edit box in the settings dialog

FIXED: I've no idea how, but it was possible to get a text value (rather than a number) into the 'Interval' text box on the settings dialog. This would cause JBS to crash. I've now corrected the problem.

968: Crash when the settings file is locked by another process - notably a virus scanner

FIXED: If a virus scanner locked the JBS settings file at a particularly inopportune moment, then it could crash JBS. This should (hopefully) no longer be the case.

969: Crash when loading a corrupt picture for montage mode in Folder mode

FIXED: While generating the 4 picture montage in folder mode if a corrupt image was encountered JBS would simply crash. This problem has now been corrected.

937: Crash in 'Select Pictures' mode when switching backgrounds

FIXED: Fixed a crash where in 'Select Pictures' mode if the previous thumbnail cache folder was inaccessible a crash would occur.

938: Crash when trying to generate a montage background

FIXED: It was possible that generating a montage image could crash John's Background Switcher on the rare chance that an imcompatible picture is loaded. This has now been corrected.

1094: Crash when a temporary file gets locked by an over-zealous virus scanner when downloading photos from Phanfare

FIXED: As the description says, it was possible to get a crash in Phanfare mode when a particular locked file was locked. This has now been corrected.

915: Crash when refreshing the background image

FIXED: If a particular temporary file was locked at a particular time when refreshing the background, JBS could crash. Now it won't!

916: Crash when loading the Phanfare dialog if you didn't have any photo albums to choose from

FIXED: If you attempted to choose a Phanfare album from your account but you didn't actually have any albums then JBS would crash. This is no longer the case.

957: Crash in 'Select Pictures' mode when the picture selected to be shown next is deleted

FIXED: If you chose a picture in 'Select Pictures' mode to be shown next, then deleted that picture or moved it, you would get a crash at the next switching time. This has now been corrected.

935: Crash when the system runs out memory

FIXED: When the system ran out of memory JBS would crash and send a report back to me to analyse. Since there's nothing I can do in that case you're now presented with a dialog telling you the system is out of memory and that JBS will close to stop being a memory hog!

933: Crash when switching using pictures on a network drive that's been disconnected

FIXED: If you were in 'Select Pictures' or 'Monitor Folders' mode and were using pictures on a network drive, then JBS could crash if that drive wasn't available. Now it just moans at you instead!

1015: Crash when using Yahoo! mode

FIXED: It was possible that JBS could crash when downloading a photo in Yahoo! mode when the network connection was terminated at an inopportune moment. This has now been corrected.

962: Crash when downloading a picture from Phanfare and your internet connection goes down

FIXED: If your internet connection disappeared at a particul bad time JBS could crash. This problem has now been corrected.

1003: Crash when a virus scanner locks some temporary files JBS tries to move

FIXED: If a virus scanner happened to deny all access to some of the temporary files JBS creates then it could, under certain circumstances, cause JBS to crash. This is no longer the case and I hate poorly written virus scanners (i.e. most of them) more every day!

988: Crash when the memory becomes corrupt for an unspecified reason

FIXED: If the memory becomes corrupt (normally during low memory conditions) JBS would tend to crash. This is no longer the case, instead it pops up a message box telling you the memory has become corrupt and exits. This was a very rare occurrence but was worth catching nonetheless.

990: Crash when Yahoo returns too many results

FIXED: If your search terms in Yahoo image search mode returned a very very very large number of results, JBS could crash. This should no longer be the case.

921: Crash when checking to see if an excluded process is running

FIXED: If you opt to stop switching when certain processes are running (using the 'Exception' section of the 'More Settings' dialog) it was possible that JBS could crash when checking the list of processes. This has now been corrected.

911: Crash in 'Folder Monitor' mode when generating a montage image and you delete a source photo

FIXED: If you deleted a file that was about to be used in a montage image while the background was being switched, you could potentially get a crash. This is no longer the case.

920: The same picture on each screen in montage mode with different resolutions doesn't scale correctly

BY DESIGN: If you choose the multiple monitor mode 'Use the same picture on each monitor' then you'll see this effect if your monitors are at different resolutions. This is deliberate since you're using exactly the same picture, so the smaller monitor will show bars at the sides or top and bottom to scale the montage picture. Select 'Use different pictures on each monitor' to prevent this from happening.

1151: When starting JBS for the first time, popup warnings are disabled

FIXED: The first time you started JBS the popup warning would automatically be disabled until you set some valid values for switching. It wouldn't cause much of a problem but was worth fixing!

923: 'Shuffle Backgrounds' displays the wrong photo info

FIXED: When selecting 'Shuffle Backgrounds' on a multi-monitor computer the descriptions for each picture wouldn't be shuffled. This has now been corrected.

952: 'SessionIDExpired' error when using Phanfare web albums

FIXED: Under certain circumstances you could be presented with this error message from Phanfare. This is no longer the case and the session ID in question will be renewed if this situation occurs.

1101: Sometimes the help won't show up unless you restart JBS

FIXED: If you opened a picture from 'Select Pictures' mode or exported your settings or in fact did anything that changed the application's working directory, then the help file would fail to launch. This has now been corrected.

1129: The 'Picture Browser' dialog sometimes shows the wrong picture when you double-click on it

FIXED: This problem has now been corrected and you can rest assured that if you double-click on a picture, you'll get to see the actual original!

1187: Change 'Next Picture' to be 'Next Background' and the same with 'Previous Picture' to 'Previous Background'

CHANGED: I've renamed the tray menu items as the description says - should be a bit more consistent.

1192: Show photo albums in reverse chronological order

CHANGED: Photo album lists as shown in Flickr, Phanfare, smugmug and Picasa mode are now shown in reverse chronological order so the newest appears at the top.

John Conners on "Mysterious 'User not found' error from Flickr"

John Conners — Fri, 02 Nov 2007 11:50:19 +0000

If you suddenly find yourself getting this error when trying to choose photos from your or someone else's Flickr photos then it's caused by a new privacy feature Flickr has introduced.

If you log in to Flickr and go to:

http://www.flickr.com/account?tab=privacy

You'll see an option called 'Hide your photos from public searches'. If you have this enabled, then neither you nor anybody else will be able to search for your photos anonymously from Flickr or any application using Flickr, such as John's Background Switcher. To view your own photos you can authorise JBS to see your photos by pressing the 'Authorisation' button on the settings dialog.

Thanks to Daniel Doughty for figuring this one out!

John Conners on "Subscribe to the knowledgebase for version updates and such like"

John Conners — Tue, 02 Oct 2007 16:36:14 +0000

If you want to keep on top of new versions of JBS and any useful information that comes up (such as any issues and workarounds) then you can subscribe to the following feed (which replaces the old JBS version release feed):

http://feeds.feedburner.com/JBSKnowledgebase

Alternatively, you can just check back in the discussion forum from time to time.

John Conners on "How to run JBS as a scheduled task (and stop it running all the time)"

John Conners — Thu, 17 May 2007 16:26:38 +0000

You can run John's Background Switcher as a scheduled task so it will only execute at the specified intervals and exit when it's done. The first thing to do is to stop it from auto-starting which you can do by opening up the settings dialog from the tray menu, then selecting 'More Settings' and the 'Advanced' button, then uncheck 'Start automatically when starting Windows'.

Next, run JBS and set up your switching options such as Flickr mode and whatever search criteria you like. Now exit and set up a scheduled task however frequently you want JBS to switch:

And use the following command line (making sure you set the folder to where you installed it):

"C:\Program Files\johnsadventures.com\John's Background Switcher\BackgroundSwitcher.exe" /next

And you're all set! When the scheduled task fires it'll launch JBS, change the background and exit - all without showing any user interface. If you want to change the settings, just launch the program, change the settings and exit again. For a full list of command line options you can use the /? switch or have a look in the help file.

John Conners on "John's Background Switcher 3.1 Release Notes"

John Conners — Tue, 08 May 2007 19:21:40 +0000

Version 3.1 is a release dedicated to bug fixing. A few crashes and bits of strange behaviour cropped up in 3.0 - including switching appearing to keep choosing the same pictures over and over in 'Select Pictures' and 'Monitor Folders' mode - and these have all been corrected.

891: Make help file links to the website open in a new window
Links to the home page within the help file now open in a new browser window rather than the current help window. This makes things less confusing.

898: Don't show the Phanfare password in plain text
The Phanfare password was previously shown in plain text so prying eyes could see it if it was on your screen. That is no longer the case.

875: Crash when the connection times out in Yahoo! mode
It was possible to crash JBS in Yahoo! mode if the connection timed out at one particular point. This has now been fixed and the unlucky few who came across the bug will no longer have to worry about it!

886: Crash when switching when the switcher is already switching
When the switcher is in the process of switching, it shouldn't be possible to kick off the switching process again. Apparently there was a bug allowing this to happen which caused a crash, which has now been fixed.

900: Crash when swapping the current and previous backgrounds over
At the point of swapping over the previous and current backgrounds (when in mosaic or montage mode) a virus-scanner could lock the files or folder which caused JBS to crash. Now it simply shows an error message instead.

861: Crash when storing thumbnails in montage or mosaic mode
The application would sometimes crash when storing the thumbnails for montage or mosaic backgrounds (which are used in the 'Browse All Pictures' dialog) as the file system would lock a folder it shouldn't have. This problem has now been corrected.

868: Crash when saving the current background picture
An over-zealous virus scanner can sometimes lock the current background picture on disk (or an over-zealous user could too I guess) and in this case, the background can't be changed. Rather than just pop up an error message, JBS was instead crashing - which it really didn't need to do. This has now been corrected.

877: Crash when the disk is full and the background is about to be switched
If your hard disk was full and the background was being switched, JBS would crash on you. Instead it now politely informs you what the problem is.

889: Monitor folder mode is not as random as it should be
Depending on how many folders you added to 'Monitor Folder' mode, you could get into a state where the same pictures would come up more often than not. This was due to a bug in the random selection algorithm and has now been corrected.

887: The same pictures keep showing up no matter what settings you use
If you used 'Select Pictures' or 'Monitor Folders' modes and pointed them at read-only files, you would find yourself continually getting the same pictures set as your background all the time. This problem has now been fixed.

John Conners on "Why do the same pictures keep coming up all the time?"

John Conners — Thu, 03 May 2007 22:17:05 +0000

There is a bug in John's Background Switcher 3.0 that occurs in 'Select Pictures' and 'Monitor Folders' mode if the photos you point it at are read-only.

It turns out that if the photos you point JBS at are read-only then they'll be copied to the current background folder JBS uses as read-only and that causes the havoc of the same pictures showing up over and over again. This problem will be fixed in the soon-to-be-released new version (3.1) in the next few days which also fixes a few other crashes that have come up.

In the meantime, you can work around the problem by going to the following folder on your machine (changing <UserName> for your user name) - note that you may need to change your folder settings in Explorer to show hidden files as this folder is hidden by default:

C:\Documents and Settings\<UserName>\Application Data\johnsadventures.com\Background Switcher

If you then delete the 'Current', 'Temp' and 'Previous' folders and make sure that all the photos you're pointing JBS at aren't read-only, then JBS will work properly and randomly select different photos from your machine.

Update: This bug has now been fixed, download the latest version to correct the problem.

John Conners on "John's Background Switcher 3.0 Release Notes"

John Conners — Wed, 11 Apr 2007 22:05:42 +0000

With over 130 new features, enhancements and bug fixes, John's Background Switcher 3 is a big step forward in the world of background switching! Ok, that's a bit OTT, but it's got lots of cool new stuff in it all the same.

Big things include moving to .NET 2 which brings improved performance and stability. You can choose photos from Phanfare and Yahoo! image search along with being able to select from multiple Flickr users, sets, etc. I've added a new 4-picture montage mode that uses 4 photos per background. Oh, enough of that, here's the complete list:

New Features

455: Add option to show different backgrounds on each screen when using multiple monitors
There is now an option on the 'Multiple monitors' drop down list on the 'Settings dialog' to 'Use different pictures on each monitor'. When you select this option then whatever switching mode you're using will attempt to use different pictures on each of your screens. A much-requested feature that gives you more variety if you're lucky enough to have dual or more monitors!

766: Background Switcher for Phanfare
You can now choose to use Phanfare as a source for your backgrounds. If you have friends with Phanfare accounts you can also select from theirs too!

744: Support JBS/Flickr authorisation on different computers
Flickr have made a change to their system that meant you could only authorise John's Background Switcher to view your own private photos on one machine at a time.

To get around this problem you can now export your authentication token from one machine (once you've authorised it) and import the token onto another machine. The import and export buttons are located on the 'Authorisation' dialog you can access from the settings dialog (when in Flickr mode and the 'My Flickr Photos' option is selected).

763: Digitally sign the installer so there are no more "Unknown Publisher" warnings
Previously, if you ran the installer on Windows XP or above you'd get a warning telling you that the software was from an unknown publisher. Now it will inform you that it has been verified as coming from "John Conners" and if someone has tampered with it, you'll be alerted to that fact.

Should give peace of mind that it's come directly from me and there won't be any spyware or something dodgy included with it.

761: Add the option to switch the current pictures between monitors
If you're running multiple monitors and have them set to show different pictures, then you can swap the pictures between monitors by selecting 'Shuffle Backgrounds' from the popup menu.

815: Make the settings dialog resizable
The settings dialog is now re-sizable for your convenience. And it remembers the size you set it to. That's about it really!

793: Allow photos to be chosen from your Flickr contact list
When choosing from 'My Photos' in Flickr mode you can now select photos from your contacts. Just pick the option from the list and your backgrounds will be selected from the most recent 50 photos uploaded by your contacts!

695: Wait for X minutes to change after boot
There is now an option on the 'More Settings' dialog to wait a period of time to start switching when the application starts. This stops it hogging all the system resources when you reboot your computer.

702: Make mosaic mode generate different images for multiple monitors
Mosaic mode now works better on multiple monitor systems. Instead of creating one mosaic and scaling it to fit all screens, a unique mosaic picture is created for each screen with the thumbnails distributed randomly. Although the same set of thumbnails are used for each screen.

706: Add picture sets to 'Select Pictures' mode
You can now create multiple picture lists in 'Select Pictures' mode. This means you can create different lists of picture (such as one for cats and another for dogs) and choose which list to have active.

655: Reduce the amount of memory the software uses
I've put in some more aggressive code to reduce the amount of memory JBS uses in normal operation. I've also moved to the new Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0 which boasts some memory usage improvements. It'll never get near the footprint of a native C++ application but it's about as good as it can get under .NET.

(If none of that makes sense, don't worry, it just means it'll make much less of an impact on your machine when it's running).

643: Add mosaic mode to 'Monitor Folders' mode
There is now an option in 'Monitor Folders' mode to create a mosaic image, this has been added to the picture display mode drop down list. This will take a random sampling of pictures from your monitored folders and produce a mosaic of small thumbnails to set as your background. It may take a couple of minutes to generate the mosaic image but it's well worth the wait!

434: Allow switching to be cancelled mid way through
When JBS is switching, the tray icon now goes green. When it's in this state you can right-click the icon and select 'Cancel' from the menu to cancel the current switching operation. This means that if your internet connection is slow and you think it's taking too long, you can cancel at any time.

479: Implement Yahoo image search mode
There is now a new mode called 'Yahoo! Image Search' that lets you enter a search query and choose your background from the results of that search. Neat!

486: Add the ability to stop switching when certain programs are running
There is now an 'Exclusions' tab on the 'More Settings' dialog that lets you specify a list of programs that, when running, will stop JBS from switching. For example, if you play a game in full-screen mode you won't want JBS switching. Simply add that game to the list!

504: Add the option to choose from multiple Flickr users, groups, etc.
You can now choose photos from as many different groups / sets / people / etc on Flickr as you like. When switching, JBS will pick one of these sources at random and download photos for your background. You really never know what's coming next!

582: Add a mini browser so you can go from downloaded Flickr photos to their web pages
There is now a 'Browse All Pictures' dialog that you can access from the tray menu. This lets you view all photos downloaded from Flickror used in a mosaic picture and with the click of a mouse you can go directly to the original.

632: Add a four picture montage option
There is a new sizing option to 'Create a four picture montage'. This will use four photos to create a montage for each monitor (oddly enough) and use different pictures on each if it can. To go to each individual photo use the 'Browse All Pictures' menu item from the tray icon.

680: Implement transparent desktop icon backgrounds on Windows 2000 and below
There is now an option on the 'Advanced' page of the 'More Settings' dialog to make the desktop icon text transparent. This only applies to Windows 2000 and below (as Windows XP and above have transparent icon text automatically).

Enhancements / Bug Fixes:

772: 'hotkeysink' dialog appearing when running John's Background Switcher
The long-standing problem where a button named 'Hotkeysinkdialog' would sometimes appear in your taskbar has finally been fixed. As with all problems like this, it's usually a one-line fix, the trick is figuring out where to put the line!

645: Crash when starting the switcher and anti-virus software locks the temporary background picture
As the description says, if you're unlucky then on starting the switcher, when the background is refreshed and an anti-virus product happens to lock a particular file, it could crash. This has now been corrected.

746: Add support for the 'jpeg' extension
Since files with the extension 'jpg' and 'jpeg' are in fact the same, files with either extension are now supported by John's Background Switcher. Previously only the former were.

758: 'View Current Image' doesn't work in mosaic mode
If you're in mosaic mode, then selecting 'View Current Image' from the tray menu brought up an error. Now the menu item is removed in this case, you can instead see the mosaic tiles and going to the originals by selecting 'Browse All Pictures' and choosing 'Current Mosaic Tiles'.

712: Disable the tray control when the settings dialog is up
If you had the settings dialog showing, the tray control would appear normal but switching will have stopped. To remove any confusion, the tray control is now disabled whenever the settings dialog is showing.

741: Add option to disable shortcuts altogether
There is now a checkbox in the 'More Settings' dialog to completely disable shortcut keys. You'll need to exit and re-start John's Background Switcher for this to take effect.

717: Adding multiple pictures at once in 'Select Pictures' mode is slow
If you added multiple pictures at once in 'Select Pictures' mode, it took an unnecessarily long amount of time - now it should add them in a flash!

719: Get the cancel button working on the more settings dialog
Okay, so now the Esc and Enter keys cancel and apply the settings in the 'More Settings' dialog as they should.

843: Add 'shuffle backgrounds' to the command line options
There is now a '/shuffle' command line option that shuffles your background pictures if you have multiple monitors.

844: Add 'view current image' to the command line options
There is now a '/gotocurrent' command line option that browses to the currently displayed background. If you are running multiple monitors it'll show the background selector dialog to let you choose.

694: Sometimes mosaic mode would fail to create a mosaic
Sometimes, when in mosaic mode, you'd get an error message giving you the name of a picture and the background wouldn't change. This was caused by a bug in the caching of thumbnails that has now been fixed.

696: When choosing photos from the last 7 days, the 'Choose from the top' number is ignored
If you choose from the top 1000 photos over the last 7 days from Flickr, then that's exactly what will happen. Previously it was hard-wired to only look at the top 140 most interesting pictures from the last 7 days. Kind of stupid now I think of it... Anyway, all is well now!

697: Move the web connection settings to the 'More Settings' dialog
To make things more logical I've moved the web connection settings to the 'More Settings' dialog. Since they apply to more than just Flickr mode it makes sense to have them somewhere central and easy to find.

698: Make the 'More Settings' button more discoverable
Since the 'More Settings' button was difficult to find (it was the green plus button in case you couldn't find it) I've made it more obvious. It's now a big button on the settings dialog that says 'More Settings'! :)

699: Hitting the 'Enter' or 'Esc' keys in the More Settings dialog doesn't do anything
Now, when in the 'More Settings' dialog, if you hit the Enter key the Ok button is pressed and the Esc key dismisses the dialog. This is the behaviour that all dialogs should have!

704: Get the installer to kill off JBS when you run it to save the user doing it
You no longer need to close John's Background Switcher when you install a new version. The installer now automatically closes JBS if it's already running for you.

708: When an update is available, change the popup menu item to 'Download New Version'
When a new version is available, you can download it straight from the tray menu instead of having to do another 'Check for Updates', clicking on a link and then getting to the download page.

715: Improve the quality of the thumbnails in 'Select Pictures' mode
Since the thumbnails on 'Select Pictures' mode were a bit grainy I thought I'd use the same thumbnail generation code I use for mosaic mode to produce better quality thumbnails. Nice.

669: Use sensible product version numbers
The version numbers of John's Background Switcher now follow the industry standard of Major.Minor.ReallyMinor.Build, such as 3.0.0.123 which would be the 123rd build of version 3.0. Sort of makes more sense.

685: 'Save Picture As' fails when invalid path characters are present in the file name
You can now save pictures with invalid characters, such as '/' in their name without an error message popping up. The invalid characters are removed and you're presented with a standard 'Save' dialog.

686: Add a context menu to the folder mode list box
You can now right-click on the folder mode list box and choose to delete the selected folder. Nice if you like context menus!

642: Make mosaic mode less confusing
You're no longer asked how many 'Thumbnails per picture' you want to use in mosaic mode. This option was causing too much confusion so to make life simpler, JBS now works out how many thumbnails it needs to create a mosaic without repetition on your screen for you. The mosaic mode option is now on the picture display drop down list box in the 'Photo Options' section.

Why I didn't write it like that in the first place I'll never know...

650: Error popup when launching JBS - access is denied to the temporary background file
Sometimes you'd get an error telling you access was denied to a temporary file. You probably couldn't care less (after all, since there's nothing you can do about it, why bother telling you!). Anyway, the problem that was causing this message has now been corrected.

651: Update the calendar at the start of each day
If you have the calendar enabled it will now automatically refresh itself at the start of each day - stops you getting confused about what day it is!

666: Make the uninstaller close JBS when it launches
Previously you had to close John's Background Switcher when you ran the uninstaller, which could be a bit confusing. Now, as soon as you launch the uninstaller from 'Add/Remove Programs' in the Control Panel, John's Background Switcher will exit so you don't have to muck about closing it and waiting!

718: Make the 'About' information easier to find
To make it easier to figure out the exact version of JBS you're running I've moved the 'About' box to the 'More Settings' dialog.

476: Move the main code into a separate assembly to aid testing
To improve code quality I've split John's Background Switcher into an exe and a separate dll so that I can perform unit testing on the core code. This will have no effect on the running of the application but will mean that it's more thoroughly tested in the future!

677: Get rid of those flaky balloon tips and use something better to notify of errors / updates
Systems older than Windows 2000 don't support balloon tips so if anything went wrong or there were any problems, JBS wouldn't be able to tell you about it. Also, balloon tips were a bit unreliable on Windows 2003 so I've thrown them out and implemented one of those more standard popup messages that appears in the bottom-right of the screen. You can of course disable it from the 'Advanced' tab of the 'More Settings' dialog.

623: Bring back the guinea pigs in the About page!
I've done better than guinea pigs - the about page now shows a random picture including chickens...

652: Add 'week starts on monday' option to the calendar
There is now an option on the 'General' tab of the 'More Settings' dialog to determine if the week on the calendar starts on Monday or Sunday. The default is now Monday (it used to be Sunday) as it's the more common format.

625: Make the mode buttons look more like buttons than menu items
I've changed the mode buttons to make them look like actual buttons if you have themes enabled (on Windows XP and above - you know, the cutesy 3D buttons). You don't really gain anything but they do look a bit better in my humble opinion!

638: Send to email / delicious should be disabled for mosaic images
The 'Send To' menu item is no longer available when a mosaic image is the current background. Since the mosaic image is generated locally, you can't send a link to it anywhere so the menu item didn't make sense.

316: Multi-selection gets confused sometimes
If you selected a particular picture in the list by clicking on it then add a new one, the selection shifts to that new item. If you then shift-clicked another picture then you would expect the selection to span the newly added item to the one you just shift-clicked - this wasn't the case, the selection would span the original item to the currently clicked one. This behaviour has now been corrected.

740: Crash when starting John's Background Switcher
Under certain rare cicrumstances the application would be unable to start. This was caused by a bug in the .NET framework that has now been corrected (thanks Microsoft!).

736: "Unknown Error (-1)" on starting John's Background Switcher
I've fixed a crash where you'd get a very (un)helpful "Unknown Error (-1)" message on starting JBS. I didn't have much to go on but managed to figure it out and fix it! Yay!

757: Crash when starting JBS and the .NET Framework hasn't finished initialising
When starting your PC, if John's Background Switcher is set to auto-run, then under certain conditions it could crash as the .NET framework hadn't initialised properly. Now this case is detected and JBS waits until this initialisation has been completed.

667: The 'My Flickr Photos' photoset button doesn't line up!
Oh disaster! Thankfully this problem has been fixed and the world can continue revolving!

John Conners on "How to stop JBS annoying you about updates"

John Conners — Tue, 29 Aug 2006 19:12:13 +0000

If you can't stand applications telling you updates are available and want to stop John's Background Switcher from ever telling you a new version is available then open up the 'More Settings' dialog (the green plus symbol on the settings dialog), click 'Advanced' and uncheck the 'Periodically check for a new version' checkbox. It'll never tell you again (unless you select 'Check for updates now' from the tray menu).

John Conners on "How to enable / disable auto-start"

John Conners — Mon, 28 Aug 2006 20:39:47 +0000

This has come up a few times:

How do I stop John's Background Switcher from starting when Windows does?

Easy, right-click the JBS tray icon and choose 'Settings' from the menu. Click 'More Settings' then uncheck the 'Start automatically when starting Windows' checkbox. OK both dialogs and JBS will no longer auto-start!

John Conners on "John's Background Switcher 2.5 Release Notes"

John Conners — Tue, 15 Aug 2006 19:03:15 +0000

I've put a lot of work into version 2.5 to improve the existing functionality, mostly based on suggestions from the people who use it (you). There are numerous new features that expand what you can do with Flickr including 'mosaic' mode (which is my personal favourite). I've also written context sensitive help which details the ever-increasing functionality of my switcher and a new 'More Settings' dialog opens up some advanced options to fine-tune your experience of John's Background Switcher. Enjoy!

New Features

391: Add the option to generate a mosaic image
There is now an option on the settings dialog to generate a mosaic image instead of downloading a single one for your background. In mosaic mode, square thumbnails are downloaded and constructed to produce a pretty impressive picture! It can take around a minute to download and construct these pictures but the results are well worth the wait!

576: Add free text search option to all Flickr modes
You can now choose to enter a search query instead of a list of tags to select photos from Flickr. Anywhere you could search by tags you can now select 'This search text' in the drop-down list and enter a search query.

540: Add option to not show photos with certain tags, like "pants"!
There is now an option called 'Ignore photos with these tags' for Flickr photos. You can specify a list of tags that you don't want to see - so if you really don't want any pictures of children being selected by Flickr, add the tag 'children' to the list!

435: Add option to show interesting photos from the last 7 days
You can now select from interesting Flickr photos from the last 7 days (just like in Flickr's Explore section). Go to choose photos from 'A Period of Time', then select 'Last 7 Days'. About time too!

607: Allow multiple folder monitoring
You can now specify multiple folders to monitor. When switching takes place, a random folder is selected and then a random photo it chosen from that folder (or subfolders if that option is enabled).

630: Add 'wait until idle' switching option
There is now an option on the Advanced section of the 'More Settings' dialog that will only switch when the system has been idle for a period of time. This stops your computer stealing the focus from whatever you're working on - instead it'll wait until you've not touched the computer for 15 seconds.

562: Add option to specify the minimum picture size to choose
You can specify the minimum picture size that will be downloaded or chosen from a folder. This option is in the 'General' section of the 'More Settings' dialog. The default is 640 pixels which should do for most people.

539: Add option to stop checking for updates
There is now an option in the 'More Settings' to stop checking for newer versions of the software. You can still do a check from the tray icon menu however if you turn off checking.

509: Command line options
I've added command line support to John's Background Switcher. If you launch it from the command line with the /? switch then you'll get the list of supported commands. Initially there are:

/next - Selects the next background
/previous - Reverts to the previous background
/refresh - Redraws the current background
/switchto [center|stretch|scale|overscale] "c:\photo.jpg" - Switches the background to the specified photo in the specified mode

It will perform the command and immediately exit. You can now use something like the Windows task scheduler to time background switches if you like!

589: Add 'schedule backgrounds' option
If you want to have specific photos show up at specific times as your desktop background, you can now do it using the command line arguments in John's Background Switcher. You can use the /switchto option combined with the task scheduler in Windows to do exactly this. Consult the documentation 'Command Line Option' page for details (or run John's Background Switcher with the /? command line argument for instructions).

521: Multiple Flickr groups
You can now choose from multiple Flickr groups. Just separate each group with a comma, such as 'cats, blackwhite, interestingness' in group pool mode and your desktop will be selected from a random one of these groups each time.

604: Implement 'add to del.icio.us' option to add the current Flickr photo to your del.icio.us bookmarks
When in Flickr mode you can now add the currently displayed Flickr photo to your del.icio.us bookmarks via the 'Send To' command on the tray menu. http://del.icio.us/ is a site where you and anybody else can store your favourites - it's free and pretty neat!

605: Implement 'send email' functionality to send the current photo to someone via email
When in Flickr mode you can now email someone a link to the currently displayed Flickr photo via the 'Send To' command on the tray menu. This is handy if you see something a photo you like and want to share it with others.

480: Write some documentation and integrate it into the software
You need some help? Well have some help! There is now a help file as part of the install (although you can opt not to select it). Every dialog has a little ? icon in the top-right, click it and you'll go to that dialog's help. You can also hit F1 or select Help from the tray menu.

If I'm doing my job right you shouldn't need it but since there are lots of new features in this version I thought it wise to put some documentation in there.

492: Add an option to stop switching when in remote desktop mode
There is now a new option to stop switching when you're running over terminal services (also known as remote desktop). The default is to stop, but you can change it in the 'More Settings' dialog.

503: Feature Suggestion: Settings Export/Import
You can now import and export your JBS settings which allows you to move your setup from one machine to another. Just go to the 'Import / Export' section of the 'More Settings' dialog and follow the instructions.

511: An ALT+CTRL+ that changes the desktop image wherever in windows you are
You can now select the next background by clicking Ctrl+Alt+N instead of using the tray menu. You can change the shortcut from the 'More Settings' dialog.

590: Integrate a calendar display onto the desktop
There is now an option to draw a calendar on the background. Go to the 'More Settings' dialog and check the 'Draw a calendar on the desktop' option. There are different options on how to display the calendar there.

573: Add an advanced settings dialog to expose all the hidden settings
There is now a 'More Settings' button on the main settings dialog that lets you change the previously hidden program settings (such as whether switching takes place when the screensaver is active or when the application starts).

394: Cache pictures from Flickr to save re-downloading them
There is now an option for Flickr titled 'Use downloaded photos as a cache' that when used in conjunction with 'Save all downloaded photos' can greatly speed up the performance of John's Background Switcher. If it's about to download a photo from Flickr and it's already been downloaded before (and is saved in the 'downloaded folder') then it'll be used as the background instead of it being needlessly re-downloaded.

So if you look at the same group pool or person's photos, it will greatly reduce the amount of bandwidth you're using by only downloading new photos rather than all the ones you've already seen.

202: Auto-rotate images based upon exif information
Photos that contain orientation information are now auto-magically rotated when set as your background image. This cures the problem where portrait pictures could be shown rotated by 90 degrees.

Enhancements / Bug Fixes

647: "The image downloaded from Flickr was invalid. Will try again next time" error
Sometimes you could come across this error when a photo from Flickr is downloaded. This was caused by EXIF information that the .NET framework was unable to read being included in the photo. This problem has now been corrected.

633: Remove installer requirement for Power User or Administrator
You no longer need to be an administrator or power user to install John's Background Switcher. However if you attempt to install to the 'Program Files' directory and don't have write access, the setup will fail.

594: Cache photo lists returned from Flickr to speed things up
Now that the limit of photos you can choose from Flickr has been greatly increased, it makes sense to cache the lists of photos Flickr returns. This will speed up the application (requiring less calls to Flickr) and will cut down on the amount of network traffic which will help both you and Flickr's servers!

617: 'View Current Image' gets confused when switching to list mode
I've re-jigged the picture-list switching mode to deal better with changing modes. Previously it was a bit dodgy when you'd change from Flickr to Picture List mode and do things like select the previous picture and redraw the background. Now it should behave consistently.

618: 'Check for Updates Now' doesn't tell me if there's no update available
If you manually check for updates from the tray menu and a new version isn't available, a balloon tip will inform you that you have the latest one.

622: Tidy up the layout of the settings dialog - it's getting too cluttered
I've attempted to clean up the settings dialog and make it a bit more intuitive by breaking it up into groups. Hopefully it'll make things easier to work out!

606: Add icons to the tray menu to make things more clear
The tray menu now sports shiny new icons for selected options. Aside from looking a bit neater, they'll stop me getting confused about which menu item does what!

559: Untitled pictures appear with "" from Flickr
If a Flickr photo is downloaded with no title, it would be shown as being called "", now the title isn't shown in this case - seemed a bit pointless really!

531: Error Popups
There is now an option in the 'More Settings' dialog to disable all balloon popups. Note that if you do this you won't be able to see any errors that occur, such as if you try to select photos from Flickr and none are available.

526: Set a sensible default file name when saving picture
When you opt to save the current picture, the actual name of the picture is entered into the Save dialog - saves you making one up!

527: Sometimes the switcher stops switching
Apparently the timer I was using in the switcher wasn't 100% reliable and could potentially stop switching for no visible reason. I've rewritten the timer to be more robust and this should no longer happen (although I only had one reported case - that's one too many)!

522: Improve 'Check for updates'
When a new version is available, a balloon tip pops up from the tray icon. You can now click on the balloon tip to go directly to the update page in a browser - saves mucking about launching the settings dialog.

602: Move the web connection settings back into the main setting file
The web connection settings are now stored back in the main settings file - this makes importing and exporting settings easier. If you want to store these settings separately as well (so that you can manually change your proxy settings outside of JBS for example), then select the 'Use an externally modifiable web connection file' option from the 'More Settings' dialog.

599: Refresh the background when you OK the settings dialog
When you OK the settings dialog, the background is refreshed - this means if you change the position of the calendar in the settings it'll be drawn in the new place as soon as you hit OK.

514: Stop polling the file system every 10 seconds
The application checked a status file on the computer every 10 seconds which could result in the hard drive powering up when it needn't. Now the status is cached and only written to disk when it changes.

587: Change the default for Flickr to not only show landscapes
No need for it to default to only showing landscapes - the image resizing means portraits won't be stretched or distorted.

568: Better handling of very large and very small pictures
If you use the 'Center pictures on the screen' option (or 'center' for picture list mode) and the picture being selected as the background is bigger than the screen, it's scaled down to fit. However if it's smaller than the size of the screen, it's simply centred and not resized.

585: Change 'Go to current picture' menu option to read 'View current image'
The menu option launches a browser for a flickr photo or opens the image viewer for a local picture - 'go to current picture' doesn't really explain that so I've changed it to make more sense.

409: The flickr picture limit of 500 is too low
You can now choose from up to 5000 photos from Flickr each time your background is changed in Flickr mode. Just look for the 'Photos to choose' text box!

581: Show how to get to the Flickr photo page for a downloaded picture
A readme file (called JBSReadme.txt) is now saved in the downloaded photos folder to explain how to get to the Flickr photo page from the saved photos. If you see a photo in there you like, you'll want to get to the actual Flickr photo page to see what other photos the person took - you always could but it wasn't very obvious and should be now!

554: Viewing of private photos has broken!
Flickr made a change to their API by adding authentication to a method call that I didn't anticipate. This broke the viewing of private photos and it's now fixed.

569: Crash when attempting connect to the internet
I've made the web connection code more robust so any unexpected problems won't result in a crash, just an error message.

572: Crash when closing down the application
If you were particularly unlucky you could shut your machine down or exit the application while it's in the process of doing something and it would crash. This should no longer be the case.

580: Crash when adding too many pictures at once in picture list mode
If you selected a really large number of pictures to add at once in picture list mode, then when you hit OK on the file selector dialog you'd get a crash. This has now been corrected.

525: Crash when switching in Flickr mode when the temporary picture is locked
It was possible for the temporary picture downloaded from Flickr during switching to be locked by an anti-virus scanner - this crashed the software. No longer!

538: Crash when redrawing the background and failing to calculate the desktop size
Under some strange circumstances the software was unable to calculate the size of the screen - this would cause it to crash rather rashly. This behaviour has now been stamped out!

553: Crash when reading from the net when the connection is forcibly reset
It was possible with very unfortunate timing to crash the application if the net connection failed at a particular point in time - this loophole has now been closed.

563: SecurityException when running as a very restricted user
Bizarrely, if you were running as a user with pretty much no access to the registry at all, you could get a crash caused by the .NET framework trying to work out how Internet Explorer draws hyperlinks! Pretty stupid really, so I've changed how it draws links to make it stop checking.

577: Removing authorisation, then cancelling the settings leaves authorisation removed
This curious and confusing behaviour has now been corrected.

Case 640: Crash after upgrading from an earlier version in folder monitor mode
If you upgraded from an earlier version of John's Background Switcher it was possible to get a crash by running the application in 'Monitor Folders' mode. This has now been corrected.

Case 641: A 'Generic Error In GDI+' error show up for certain images
Thanks to a bug in the underlying .NET Framework, some pictures would fail to display when the 'auto-rotate pictures' advanced option was active. This problem has now been corrected.

John Conners on "John's Background Switcher 2.4 Release Notes"

John Conners — Mon, 06 Mar 2006 18:48:58 +0000

The main highlight for 2.4 is the addition of the ability to choose from your own private photos. There are more bug fixes than you can shake a stick at and there are numerous other bits and pieces that most people won't notice (hell, I don't even notice)! I'm planning on the next version having a lot of new features but thought it was well worth getting this one out the door first.

New Features

424: Add authorization to show your own private photos
There is now an option in 'User Flickr' mode to use 'My Flickr Photos'. This will allow you to show photos from your own Flickr site including private ones. To get it to work, click the 'Authorise' button which will launch an authorisation dialog. Follow the instructions to give John's Background Switcher read access to your photos which will allow it to select from all your photos (including private ones). Note that this will only allow your install of John's Background Switcher to see your private photos, not everybody that uses it!

518: Prevent small images being chosen as backgrounds in 'Monitor' mode
When in 'Monitor A Folder' mode if a small picture was selected, say a 16x16 one, it looked a bit ridiculous being set as the background. Now, if the maximum width / height is less than 640 pixels it won't be considered for switching.

507: Stop checking for updates so frequently!
Instead of checking for newer versions every time you start the application and every 24 hours thereafter, the software will now check every 4 days - it seems a bit more sensible. You can always click 'Check for Updates Now' from the tray icon to force a check any time you like.

491: Make 'scale' the default mode when adding new pictures in picture list mode
When you add a new picture in 'Picture List' mode it will default to being shown in 'scale' mode. This made more sense than 'stretch' which more often than not would distort the proportions of the picture.

493: Refresh the background when the application starts
If you used a laptop with multiple monitors and rebooted it without the second monitor attached, the background would be drawn incorrectly - now when the application starts the first thing it does is refresh the background to make sure all is well.

433: Refresh the background when the screen resolution changes
If you changed your screen resolution, or move one of your monitor locations around in the Windows display settings dialog, the wallpaper would appear to be tiled incorrectly. This has now been corrected so the background will be redrawn once the display settings are changed (well, within a few seconds anyway).

460: Only bother switching when the screensaver isn't active
The background will now only be changed when the screen saver isn't active. It was a bit pointless changing the background if you're not able to see it!

470: Add 'scale picture and fill screen' option to resize pictures
There is a new resizing mode for pictures: 'Scale pictures to FULL screen' (or 'over-scale' in 'Select Pictures' mode). This re-sizes the picture to fill the entire screen (or screens) while maintaining the correct proportions of the picture. If the scaled picture is larger than the screen then the edges will be trimmed off. If you want to always see the whole of the picture then 'Scale pictures to fit the screen' (or 'scale' in 'Select Pictures' mode) is the one for you!

477: Write text on image AFTER resize
If you enable 'Show photo info on the photo' in Flickr mode then the title and owner of the photo are drawn in the top-right corner of the screen. Previously the size would vary depending on the size of the photo but now they are always drawn at the same size and at the top-right of each screen in a multiple monitor setup.

Bug Fixes

468: Crash when monitoring a folder on a network drive that's disconnected
If you used the application in 'Monitor A Folder' mode and pointed it at a network path, then removed it, you could get a crash. This is no longer the case.

483: Crash when downloading a Flickr photo from the internet
A network configuration error could case the software to crash when downloading a photo from Flickr. This will no longer cause the crash and will alert you to the error instead.

499: Crash when clicking the 'Go to the Background Switcher homepage' link
If a default browser isn't available and you clicked the 'Go to...' link on the settings dialog, you could get a crash. Now you get a friendly message box instead!

501: Crash when switching backgrounds in file or folder mode
If you had a picture that was of a format unsupported by the .NET framework (there's the odd JPG out there that this happens with) and it was chosen in 'Picture List' or 'Monitor A Folder' mode then the application would crash. Now it won't, it'll just tell you which one the offending picture is.

502: Crash when a virus scanner has locked the connection settings file
John's Background Switcher maintains the web connection settings file separately to the main settings (so that you can manually change them outside of the software). If this file became exclusively locked (by a virus scanner for example) when Flickr is being contacted, then the application would crash. I've fixed this and instead display a balloon message in the system tray. This means you can continue and the next time it contacts Flickr everything will be fine (unless the file is locked again). I've only had a couple of reports of this problem come in so I'm going to assume that it only happens intermittently and this solution should do the trick.

505: Crash when refreshing the background
It was possible to crash the software when refreshing the background when you hadn't first done any switching. This has now been fixed and my wrist has been slapped for not checking if there was a background already there!

481: The tray icon sometimes looks boxy in lower resolution mode on Windows 2000
Operating systems below Windows XP (e.g. Windows 98 and 2000) wouldn't render the tray icons correctly - this has now been corrected.

519: Put the version number in the settings dialog title bar
As requested, the version of the software now appears in the title bar of the settings dialog.

John Conners on "Why has the tray icon gone yellow?"

John Conners — Tue, 28 Feb 2006 10:20:29 +0000

The tray icon goes yellow when there's a new version of John's Background Switcher available for download. You can either go to the Download Page yourself or bring up the settings dialog and click the "New Version Available" link which will take you to the same place. Once you've installed the latest version the tray icon will return to its usual colour.

John Conners on "How much memory does John's Background Switcher Use?"

John Conners — Mon, 27 Feb 2006 16:10:00 +0000

I wrote JBS (it's quicker to write than John's Background Switcher so I'll stick with that for a bit) in C# using Microsoft's .NET 1.1 Framework. This means that when you run the application it also launches the .NET runtime which means that the memory footprint is larger than if I'd written it in C++ (which was what I was originally going to do).

The fallout - which has been noted by a few people - is that during normal operation JBS consumes around 25-35MB of memory (it spikes a bit higher when it loads an image but drops back down again afterwards). Now these days that's nothing, memory is cheap and most of it will be swapped onto disk rather than in RAM. But if I'd written it in C++ the figure would probably have been less than a tenth of that. There's not a lot I can do about it I'm afraid short of re-writing it in C++ - but I'm not going to do that just now (although I may do for fun in the future).

As for processor usage, during normal operation it won't even register on Task Manager (which is unreliable anyway - you're better off with Process Explorer if you want to be accurate). However when it's doing it's thing, it will go up accordingly - although I must point out that it's not doing anything clever so shouldn't use much processing time. I've got an ancient laptop at home I use to test how much effect JBS has on its normal operating and aside from when it's actually drawing the background (no more than a couple of seconds each time it changes background) it doesn't appear to make a dent.

I chose C# because I wanted to knock the app out quickly (I originally wrote it for me) and I also knew that if I'd written it in C++ and distributed it then I'd have to deal with the joys of making sure the the correct dependencies were installed and all the usual pain. With C# I just had to make sure .NET was installed and I knew it'd work.

I hope that provides a bit of background!

John Conners on "John's Background Switcher 2.3 Release Notes"

John Conners — Sun, 05 Feb 2006 21:35:05 +0000

Version 2.3 fixes three crashes that came up and could cause you a bit of annoyance. They all came within a couple of days of each other which was strange, as the potential for the crashes has been there for some time. Must be one of those weeks!

461: Crash when loading a corrupt or unsupported image in 'Select Pictures' mode
If you added an invalid or unsupported image to the picture list, the application would crash when attempting to set it as the background. This will no longer happen, you'll just get a warning message pop up from the tray icon.

465: Crash when Flickr returned invalid data
Sometimes Flickr would return invalid data when asking for a selection of photos and this would crash the application (it's only happened once but that's enough for me) so now it carries on regardless.

467: Crash when trying to select form a photo set
I inadvertently managed to break photoset functionality (I really should know better), so it should be working again!

John Conners on "John's Background Switcher 2.2 Release Notes"

John Conners — Thu, 02 Feb 2006 21:58:27 +0000

Version 2.2 improves a couple of features introduced in Version 2.1 and corrects a few other minor bugs you may or may not have encountered.

New Features

447: Add additional resizing options
There are now three distinct picture resizing modes (in addition you can also 'Tile' pictures in 'Select Pictures' mode but that's nothing new). You can either 'Center pictures on the screen' which will simply draw the picture in the middle of your screen(s) at its actual size. You can 'Stretch pictures to full screen' which will stretch the picture to completely fit your screen(s) - this means that if you have a portrait-oriented picture it'll be distorted out of its original proportions. The final option is 'Scale picture to fit the screen' which will resize the picture to be as large as possible and fit on your screen(s) while maintaining its proportions - if there is any space at either the top/bottom or left/right it'll be filled with the background colour. I'll add more options in the future but these should cover most requirements for now!

450: Reload proxy settings prior to doing anything on the internet
The internet connection settings for John's Background Switcher are now stored in a separate file to the main settings. Each time a connection to the internet is made, the file is reloaded. This means you can change the proxy settings outside of the application and they'll automatically be picked up. Note however that the password value in the file is encrypted for security. The installer will automatically migrate any existing settings to the new file when you run it. The connection settings file is called 'WebConnectionSettings.xml' and is located in the user application directory for John's Background Switcher.

Bug Fixes

451: Prevent the same Flickr photo being saved multiple times
When 'Save all download photos' is checked, the photos are now saved in a format such that the same photo won't be downloaded multiple times. They're saved with names like '10685022@N00-8868468.jpg' in the format '[UserId]-[PhotoId].jpg'. You can use this information to find the photo's Flickr page at a later point in time by using this URL: http://www.flickr.com/photos/UserId/PhotoId so for the above example you'd browse to: http://www.flickr.com/photos/10685022@N00/8868468

454: Rare crash when writing picture info on a Flickr photo
Misbehaving software can cause a .NET 1.1 application (like this one) to crash when accessing fonts for display. While very rare (I've only had one crash report with this particular bug) I thought it prudent to handle when it could happen. Note that this isn't caused by John's Background Switcher, it's caused by some other rogue .NET application not cleaning up after itself when calling unmanaged code. For more information on the problem see the following Microsoft article: http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=KB;EN-US;q326219

459: Crash when starting up and the status xml file is corrupted
If you edited the status.xml file or it got corrupted in some way then the application would crash on start-up. This has now been corrected.

449: Change 'Clear Background' to generate a clear background
In certain circumstances, 'Clear Background' wouldn't work. Instead of telling Windows that there isn't a background picture any more, the background picture is set to a picture filled with the background colour. It should now work in all cases.

453: Do what John Topley says and remove the access keys from OK and Cancel
I hope you're happy now John, the OK and Cancel buttons no longer have access keys associated with them! :)

John Conners on "John's Background Switcher 2.1 Release Notes"

John Conners — Tue, 24 Jan 2006 23:09:28 +0000

Version 2.1 builds on Version 2.0's new features, particularly Flickr integration. There are improvements to the way it connects to the internet, I've added new ways to choose photos from Flickr (by day or by group pool for example), the software now checks for newer versions of itself, I've added proper multi-monitor support (allowing you to stretch a picture across all your monitors), improved the way pictures are resized and made a raft of bug fixes and other enhancements detailed below. I've also made some tweaks and improvements to the layout of the dialogs to make them easier to use.

New Features

407: Add option to show a person's favourite photos
You can now choose to select photos from a person's publicly visible favourites when in Flickr more. Just select from 'A Specific Person' then choose from 'Their Favourites' in the settings dialog.

410: Add option to check for updates
The application now checks periodically if there is a new version of John's Background Switcher available. If there is the tray icon turns yellow and it pops up a message telling you and the next time you open the settings dialog a link will appear that takes you to do the download page. You can force the check by clicking 'Check for Updates Now' from the tray pop-up menu. Remember, if the tray icon turns yellow, there's a new version available!

72: Add multi-monitor support
At long last I've implemented multiple monitor support. Now the application will correctly size pictures on different monitors when you choose to stretch or center them (previously the primary monitor would show properly but the sizes would be all wrong for the other monitors). There is now also an option to 'use one picture for the whole desktop' which means the selected picture will be split up to cover all attached monitors and scaled accordingly - this is a must-have for multiple monitors.

401: Add group selection to the Flickr options
You can now choose to select photos from group pools as well as from specific users and tag searches.

423: Have an option to download original size Flickr images for users who have desktops greater than 1024x768
There is now an option 'Always use original photo size' that means you can now choose to always download the largest images from Flickr. Handy if you use a large monitor.

381: Add a link to go to the current picture
There is now a 'Go to Current Picture' menu item that will take you to the currently displayed picture. If it's on your computer it'll launch the default viewer and if it's on Flickr you'll be directed to the photo's Flickr page in your default web browser.

390: Add option to not stretch images in monitor mode
You can now specify if you want to stretch or center pictures when in 'Monitor A Folder' mode. Previously it would always stretch the image to fit your screen size whether you wanted it to or not!

436: Add option to show the most interesting photos from Flickr for any given day (eg. today)
There is now an option to choose the most interesting photos from Flickr on a specific day. You can select from yesterday, today and a custom date.

438: Add an option to refresh the wallpaper in case it's been changed elsewhere
You can now click 'Redraw Background' from the tray menu and that will redraw the background (oddly enough). So if you clear the background or change your screen resolution then this will set it back and take any display changes into account.

442: Add the option to automatically save all downloaded photos from Flickr
There is now an option called 'Save all downloaded photos' that will automatically save all photos downloaded from Flickr to a folder on your computer. This means you can look at them later. The default folder is a folder called 'John's Background Switcher' in your 'My Pictures' folder but you can change it to anything you want.

396: Add option to blank the screen in case something dodgy comes up
There is now a 'Clear Background' option on the system tray menu that will instantly clear your background. This protects against the odd dodgy photo that comes from Flickr, or maybe you just don't want to have a background picture for a while.

Bug Fixes

403: Rare crash when timing out connecting to Flickr
Under certain circumstances it was possible for the application to crash when it timed out trying to connect to Flickr. This has now been corrected.

408: The fonts on the settings dialog are different
Some of the labels on the settings dialog would render differently on Windows XP, now they're all the same.

388: Store the last Flickr picture to make sure we don't show it next
It was possible for the same picture to be chosen twice in a row as they're selected randomly. Now you are guaranteed a different picture than the last time (assuming there is more than one in your selection criteria).

422: Proportionally resize images
To prevent the distortion of pictures, if you choose to 'center' a picture while in picture list mode, or uncheck the 'stretch' option in the other modes, then the picture will be scaled up to fit the screen while maintaining its correct aspect ration. This means that some pictures will display a border but you can set the colour to suit.

425: Crash when selecting previous then next in picture list mode
If you started the application for the first time or restarted switching while in 'Select Pictures' mode then selected 'Previous Picture' in the menu, then 'Next Picture' it would crash. Did you get that? Well, it's now fixed.

439: Stop it telling me that it's paused when I cancel the settings dialog
If switching was paused and you opened the settings dialog then hit cancel a balloon tip would pop up to tell you it was paused. I don't know about you but I found it pretty annoying so I've taken it out. It will only show if switching is paused and you hit OK on the settings dialog.

John Conners on "John's Background Switcher 2.0 Release Notes"

John Conners — Tue, 24 Jan 2006 23:03:57 +0000

Version 2.0 is a major new release for John's Background Switcher and comprises some large new features and a raft of bug fixes.

New 'Big' Features

317: Be able to choose photos to use from Flickr
You can now run the application in Flickr mode where you can choose the pictures to switch your background with from everyone, a specific user, a photo set or with any tags you like. So for example you could choose 'Everyone' and the tag 'beach' so your desktop will be set with random photos of beaches from every Flickr account. You never know what's coming next! There are plenty of options to narrow down your search such as choosing the most interesting (i.e. popular) pictures, only use landscape-oriented pictures and plenty more besides. The software should be able to automatically connect to Flickr in most cases but you can define your own proxy connection settings if that doesn't happen.

71: Be able to specify a directory to be watched for pictures to switch
You can now click the 'Monitor A Folder' button and the switcher will select random pictures from that folder. You can add pictures to the folder and they'll automatically be included in the mix.

Bug Fixes and Enhancements

337: Remove the option to set the switching interval of seconds
The minimum switching interval is now one minute, rather than one second. I'm not sure why the interval was so low but for various reasons I thought I'd change it.

385: The alt-tab icon isn't right
If you had the settings dialog open and hit Alt-Tab, the icon wouldn't be the correct one for the application. This has now been corrected.

386: Make right-click menu act on selected pictures only
If you select some pictures in the picture list and want to stretch, tile or center them all you can now right-click and do exactly that. Previously the right-click menu would act on all pictures but now it's restricted to those you have selected.

352: Add option to copy crash report to the clipboard
If you encounter a crash in John's Background Switcher and are unable to upload it automatically to my server, then you can now view the report and copy it to the clipboard. This means you can email it to me, or alternatively have a look at it yourself to satisfy your curiosity!

356: Add 'days' to the interval options
You can now select 'days' as the interval to switch your background. When you select 'day(s)' in the interval drop-down a check box appears called 'Switch at midnight' that when checked means your background will be switched at midnight (or as close as possible to midnight if your computer is off at that time) the specified number of days apart. So if you select an interval of 2 days and check the midnight box, your background will be changed at midnight every 2 days. If you don't check that box, it will change every 2 days from whenever it was last changed.

369: Crash reporting can't send reports back through proxies
Crash reports will now pick up the current proxy settings so should work from within a corporate firewall.

375: Uninstalling deleted my switcher settings!
When you uninstall John's Background Switcher you are now asked if you want to delete your personal settings. If you choose 'No' and later re-install, your settings will be remembered.

379: Create some new tray icons
I've changed the colour of the tray icons to be blue rather than green. It turns out that Microsoft ActiveSync also uses a similar green icon so I thought I'd remove the confusion. I thought mine was better than Microsoft's though!

318: Integrate the downloading and installation of Microsoft.NET with the installer
John's Background Switcher uses Microsoft.NET 1.1 so when you run the installer it will detect if the framework is installed and if not download it from Microsoft and install it too automatically.

319: Tidy up the background colour selection process
A standard colour selector dialog is now used when you click the button to change the desktop colour.

336: Change the tray icon when in the process of switching to a busy icon
When the switcher is in the process of changing the background picture the icon in the system tray now changes colour to gray to show that it's busy working.

313: Don't restart switching when the settings are changed
When you open the settings dialog and hit OK the settings are no longer restarted. This means that if you're cycling through some pictures the switcher will remember where it was when you add some more. If you want to restart switching when you change the settings, hold down the Shift key when you press OK.

367: Add option to save current picture
There is now an option on the popup menu to save the current picture. If you like the currently selected background (maybe from Flickr!) you can now save it away for later!

324: Prevent double switches from happening
It was possible to confuse the switcher by double double-clicking on the tray icon. This is no longer the case.

322: Clicking 'Previous Picture' doesn't reset the switch timer
If the switch interval is one hour and you clicked 'Previous Picture' with 10 seconds to go, then it would change again 10 seconds later. Now when you select a previous picture the timer resets.