After what seems like quite a long time, I’ve finally finished up the latest version of John’s Background Switcher. Over the past few months I’ve implemented 98 features, enhancements and bug fixes. At last I’m greeted by this picture in my bug tracking software:

Of course, there’s plenty still on The List, but I had to draw the line somewhere, put out a new version and have a break before embarking on the mighty road to 3.0.

All along I’ve wanted to keep JBS a simple application and avoid the sort of feature-creep that often turns neat, snappy applications into unwieldy monsters that are nearly impossible for the beginner to figure out. It’s been a constant battle to put in cool new features without compromising simplicity and ease of use. While it may not look a whole lot different to previous versions I can assure you that a lot of design work’s gone into making the user interface stay intuitive while adding a lot of new pieces of functionality. Oh yeah, and I sort of cheated by adding a ‘More Settings’ dialog that contains a boat load of customisations as requested by the people who use it.

I must thank the people who were crazy enough to help beta test this version and provide me with a hell of a lot of valuable feedback. While I couldn’t get everything asked for in to this version, they’re all on The List and will get there eventually. Thanks again! 🙂

If I were to pick my favourite 3 new features in this version I’d choose these:

• Mosaic mode – instead of setting a single picture as your background, it goes and downloads a selection of thumbnails and generates a mosaic and sets that as your background – very cool.
• Explore from the last 7 days – you can now select from the most interesting photos uploaded to Flickr from the last 7 days – excellent pictures guaranteed.
• Send to del.icio.us – if you see a cool photo on your background from Flickr, you can quickly add it to your del.icio.us bookmarks for later viewing!

The download page is here. Have fun! Now, I’m off for a well-deserved cup of coffee…

Update: Well, a couple of annoying bugs appeared (why do they never show up in testing?) so I thought I’d quickly release a new version with those fixes in. You can do a ‘Check For Updates Now’ and follow the instructions or just go to the download page and get the installer. D’Oh!