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It has been just three days since the previous release of imgAreaSelect, and I’m already here with a new version! How’s that for short release cycles? But seriously, I screwed up a bit with the last release. There was a problem with the implementation of scaling which limited the area available for selection on scaled images, and it somehow went unnoticed during testing. Anyway, version 0.9.8 fixes it.

Thanks to Martin Fowler for catching this issue.

ImgAreaSelect 0.9.7 has just been released. It’s a few days later than I originally anticipated, as I bumped into some problems with the automated tests. Well, I guess with a dozen browsers, some running on virtual machines, some compiled from source code, I can’t expect things to be easy. Anyways, the significant changes in this version are:

• The minWidth/minHeight/maxWidth/maxHeight options now respect scaling
• There is a new API method, cancelSelection(), which cancels the current selection (as the name suggests)

Big thanks to everyone who provided feedback, especially to Loa and Greg.

With each new version, I spend some time making sure the plugin code is as small as possible — after all, the project home page states “the packed version is less than 8 KB”, and I want to keep it that way. But, the packed code for this release was initially about 40 bytes more than 8 KB, so I had to do some refactoring. By changing a few regular expressions, I managed to get it down to 8191 bytes, which happens to be exactly one byte less than 8 KB. That’s a close call, but, hooray, my statement still holds true!

A quick announcement: the GitHub project page for imgAreaSelect now includes a Roadmap, which lists the planned updates for the upcoming releases of the plugin. At the moment, I have a couple things in the backlog that I want to implement in the next patch-level release (0.9.7), and in the major milestone version 1.0. The changes planned for version 0.9.7 are rather simple, so I hope to release it this week or the next, and then we’ll be on the straight way to 1.0.

All the hype nowadays is about mobile technologies and mobile web, and one of the major updates in imgAreaSelect 1.0 is going to be mobile browser support. I’ve been working on this for some time, and the result so far is something that pretty much works in the standard Android browser and in Safari on IOS devices (iPhone and iPad). However, it’s probably going to take a few more weeks before it’s ready to go live, because a) I want to (try to) get it to work in other browsers, specifically Opera Mobile, and b) mobile browsers support required significant changes to basic plugin code, so I need to make sure everything still works as it did before, and probably rewrite a couple test cases.

Here’s a little teaser — imgAreaSelect on the iPhone simulator:

ImgAreaSelect version 0.9.6 is out. A new major release of jQuery (1.6) came out a few days ago, and it turned out that the previous version of imgAreaSelect was not compatible with it — this version fixes this problem.

As always, thanks to all the people who reported this issue and provided feedback (especially to Rob Crawford and Giovanni Battista Lenoci for their valuable input).

A new release of imgAreaSelect is out. It fixes a major issue with plugin initialization in Internet Explorer 9, which was reported to me by a few people. Thanks to all of you, especially to McArrow, who provided the fix.

Just a quick announcement: I have added a FAQ page for imgAreaSelect. The three questions currently there make around 80% of the e-mails that I get about the plugin, so I thought it would be reasonable to answer them in a FAQ.

Enjoy your weekend!

A new minor release of imgAreaSelect is out. It fixes a small issue that affected bordered images, and adds a new option, resizeMargin, which allows you to set the space near the border of the selection area where resizing is allowed (previously hardcoded to 10px).

As usual, thanks and kudos to all the nice people who reported bugs and sent feedback.

By the way, this release is also the first one to be available on GitHub, so you can go and fork the hell out of it.