Export enhancements: faster, safer & better.
Yet another minorbutcool update today, focusing on export related issues:
- JPG export is now up to 4 times faster, thanks to Thibault’s fantastic work on optimizing the class responsible for encoding JPEGs for export. If you are into Flash/Flex development and don’t know Thibault’s website, you are missing on something, bookmark it quickly, this guy rocks !
The cool thing with that speed upgrade, besides an obviously better user experience thanks to the faster response, is that it will allow me to consider supporting higher resolution exports, meaning higher quality output, lovely! - I fixed a nasty bug that had insidiously slept in when I solved the infamous “orphan symbol issue“: edges of diagrams containing connections reaching outside symbols got cut off during export… Well, it’ no longer the case :)
- Rounded edges now look a lot nicer in exported images, check out the difference below
- PNG is now the default export format. If you don’t know what this means, essentially it means your images will be by default exported with a transparent background, implying you can use them on coloured, gradient and drawn backgrounds.
- Last but not least, a quick note to let you know Lovely Charts now requires Flash Player 10. This was essentially motivated by the perspective of offering the (much) faster JPG export mentioned above. It makes me slightly nervous to impose this, but my stats show that cc 80% of all my users have FP10 already anyway, the player installation is a pretty easy process, so I believe this shouldn’t be much of an issue anymay, but please let me know if this is an issue for you for whatever reason!
