It’s been a long time coming but it’s almost here. I’ve decided to release RC1 (Release Candidate 1) to the public so that it can be tried out on a larger variety of systems. If you would like to try out the latest version early please go to the Products > AutoWallpaper > Download page, at the bottom of the page you will find the links for both the Windows and Mac OS X versions.
AW5.5 will uninstall and replace your current AW5.x install and it will also make critical changes to your AutoWallpaper settings so you will not be able to go back to AW5.x without needing to reconfigure your categories (not that you’ll want to:) ).
So, what is AW5.5 all about? AW5.5 brings about a massive structural change to the internals of AutoWallpaper. In previous versions the category updating would prevent you from editing any of your other categories that weren’t being updated at the time. This has now changed. When categories are being updated the interface will display a progress bar at the bottom of the window, but the main category display will continue to be usable, the only category you won’t be able to edit is the one that is actually being processed.
Speed increases due to a change in the way category data is stored means that wallpaper listings appear almost instantly (depending on size of categories – my tests with a category of 5,000 images appeared with no delay), category updating has also seen marked speed increases (meta data importing will slow down the process).
As requested, PiP usage is now logged along with the main wallpapers. You can see which PiPs were used in each cycle by accessing the log (Preferences > Log), in the M column you will find PiP displayed next to the relevant images.
Well, that’s about it. I know it might not sound like much but the reorganisation of the internal code required to replace the category store with an entirely new method was very complex and time consuming, but it was definitely worth it.
All being well AW5.5 will be officially released early October, after some further testing.
