Version 4.9 of John’s Background Switcher is a pretty minor release containing fixes for a few bugs that cropped up along the way. The main change is to support the fact that Flickr now connects only over HTTPS which is good as it means nobody can snoop on the data going back and forth between your machine and Flickr. Yay!
Features and Changes
9476: Change all Flickr URLs to use secure https ones
CHANGED: Flickr will shortly be deprecating their http API endpoints in favour of encrypted https ones. So in advance of that JBS now only interacts with Flickr over encrypted https.
9490: Add support for Reddit image feeds
FEATURE: You can now add reddit feeds to JBS and it’ll pick from any pictures in the feed. Feeds such as http://www.reddit.com/r/wallpaper.rss or http://www.reddit.com/r/spaceporn.rss and many more besides. You basically add “.rss” onto the end of the reddit URL and put it into the RSS Feeds section of JBS and you’re good to go!
9636: Add the option to restrict 500px searches by category (e.g. ‘fresh’ landscape photos)
FEATURE: You can now choose from any of the categories 500px has when selecting from Popular, Editors choice, Upcoming or Fresh photos if you want to narrow down the exact photos you want to see.
Bug Fixes
9224: If you used individual picture modes for picture sources then the collage mode wouldn’t be remembered
FIXED: No, you weren’t going crazy, it was definitely a bug!
9351: When choosing photos from some Flickr users the ‘Use largest available image size’ option would have no effect
FIXED: Due to some inconsistencies in the Flickr API the full size photos from some users were not available when querying for photos. However now if you’ve selected ‘Use largest available image size’ and you’re using a single picture per monitor, JBS will go and get the original image as it should do.
9192: No photos found when you add a private Flickr photo set to JBS
FIXED: Under certain circumstances JBS would report that it couldn’t find any pictures for certain Flickr photo sets. This has now been corrected.
9529: Dropbox does not appear on the ‘Set Picture Modes’ dialog
FIXED: Oops, I neglected to add Dropbox to the source-specific picture mode dialog. Bad John!
9661: JBS doesn’t fill all monitors with different DPIs on Windows 8.1
FIXED: If you ran Windows 8.1 with multiple monitors of different sizes and chose (or let Windows choose) to have different DPI on each monitor, then JBS would leave annoying blank space around at least one of the monitors and not fill the screen. This behaviour has now been corrected.