[Kst] Kst 2.0.8 released!

Sat Jul 19 18:27:18 UTC 2014

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Kst 2.0.8 released July 19th 2014

The Kst team is happy to announce the immediate availability of version 2.0.8 of the Kst plotting tool. This version contains many bugfixes and a few new features compared with 2.0.7.
Packages for Windows are available from http://sourceforge.net/projects/kst/files/Kst%202.0.8/, as well as the complete source code and cmake-based build files. 
Note: the 32 bit version is recommended for Windows users who need data analysis plugins, as the 64 bit version brings more performance and support for extra large data sets but with a limited number of plugins.
Some Linux distributions provide packages in their own or add-on repositories, updates will appear in the next days. 
Finally, expect Mac OSX packages to appear on sourceforge very soon as well.

Kst is characterized by the following features:
- Outstanding performance: curves with millions of points are no problem at all!
- Plotting of live streams
- Out-of-the box support for a variety of formats (currently ASCII, netCDF, dirfile, Matlab's .mat, QImage-supported types, FITS images and tables)
- User-friendly with a modern and consistent user interface
- A set of unique tools to boost efficiency, including a fantastic data import wizard, capacity to edit multiple objects at once or the "Change Data File" tool to compare multiple experiments easily
- Extensive batch mode and python scripting under Linux
- An active community
- Easily expandable for new data formats or data analysis algorithms thanks to a plugin-based architecture
- Available on Windows, Linux and Mac OSX

A more detailed presentation of Kst can be found on the web page at \
http://kst-plot.kde.org, including numerous screenshots and all the useful download \
links.  

The most notable improvements brought by Kst 2.0.8 over the 2.0.7 version released in July 2013 are listed below:  

1) Data sources
- A new datasource: sourcelist, which is a successive list of otherwise identical datasources
- Another new datasource: FITS tables, contributed by a new contributor: Nicholas Chapman. Welcome!
- ASCII improved once again to support huge files (>8 GB!)
- Add option how empty ASCII columns should be handled (NaN, copy previous, interpolate)
- Improve ASCII config dialog layout
- Handle data sources which are temporarily typed into the data source selector, but which are not actually used and when a data source is deleted, delete its slave primitives as well

2) Main new features
- Thanks to the awesome job done by the KDE internationalization team, Kst 2.0.8 is now available in the following languages: ca ca at valencia de en_GB fr nl pl pt pt_BR sv uk. Kst will default to using the system language, if available. To override this, launch with e.g. "LANG=en ./kst2"
- A progress bar appears when parsing large ASCII files, very nice when it takes long with huge files!
- Reworked view vector values allowing easy comparison of vectors and changing the number of digits shown - a first step towards a more table-centric view as in other plotting tools
- Add filtering to the data manager to allow finding items easily in complex sessions
- Add an "unwind" filter: for data fields that have wrapped. For example, an angle (0-360 degrees) which has rotated several times
- New plugin to compute the "activity level" of a signal as the product of standard deviation and number of reversals over a sliding window. 

3) Misc. improvements
- Scripting: major rework underway - still ongoing. Hopefully Python scripting will be supported under Windows as well in the next version
- Add a -T command line option which creates a new tab
- Equations: add 'degree' versions of the trig functions: sind, cosd, etc as well as atan2(x,y)
- Avoid having to type * before/after the text in the editmultiple widget
- HOWTO explaining how to add a plugin
- Improvements to use the whole available space in the scalar/vector/matrix/string selectors
- Fix loads of Krazy2 issues
- To reduce the impact of latent/glitchy file system situations, delay reloading a file which looks like it has shrunk
- Use "Spectrogram" instead of "CSD"
- Option to use the "native" Qt graphics system if "use raster" is not selected (native works far better for remote X)
- Website updates (more coming, especially video tutorials)

4) Bug fixes
- Scalar selector improvements
- Many improvements in the update system and propagation of data source configuration changes
- Solve wrong vector selection in shift and differentiation plugins -> BUG: 325393
- Fix annoying bug breaking the recent data file and session lists -> BUG: 325086
- Only reset starting frame to skip boundry if in count from end mode -> allow selecting the right subsamples when using skip in other cases
- Various fixes to ASCII configuration to ensure that we don't parse the whole file when we only want to change the settings
- Make sure custom color applies to all lines of a multi line text label
- Don't crash when there is an exception while searching for rows
- Some improvements to defaults in filter plugins
- Fix enabling/disabling widgets in FFT options -> BUG: 328371
- In datawizard, don't create plots if no curves -> BUG: 307723
- Update curve names in plot dialog when changed -> BUG: 318139
- Further performance improvements 

5) Build system
- Switch to git, first github (https://github.com/Kst-plot/kst - still synced to the main repository at KDE) and then back to KDE ("git clone git at git.kde.org:kst-plot")
- Automatic binary snapshots from git are available from http://syntheticpp.github.io/kstbinary/
- Qt4 + Qt5 compatibility 

A comprehensive changelog between 2.0.7 and 2.0.8 can be found here: 
http://kst-plot.kde.org/files/Log_messages_2.0.7_to_2.0.8.txt

We hope you will enjoy this version, which has been a bit too long in preparation due to the infrastructure changes performed. 
Don't hesitate to promote it among your friends and colleagues, and let us know your wishes for future releases.  

The Kst Team
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