[Kst] Kst 2.0.3 released!

[Nicolas Brisset]

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Kst 2.0.3 released April 16th 2011 

The Kst team is happy to announce the immediate availability of Kst 2.0.3, an outstanding open-source, cross-platform 2D plotting tool. Packages for Windows, various Linux distributions and Mac OS X are available, as well as the complete source code and cmake-based build files. 
A more detailed presentation of Kst can be found on the completely revamped web page at http://kst-plot.kde.org , which provides detailed screenshots , video tutorials (coming in the next days) and all the useful download links . 

Kst2 is a major rewrite to Qt4 of the long-existing, Qt3/KDE3-based Kst1 code base. Kst2 offers many new features compared with Kst1, including better meta data support, improved name handling, and shared axis boxes. For those who need the ability to read Kst1 files, and scripting (not yet supported in Kst2), Kst1 and Kst2 are installable in parallel. 
This Kst2 release has benefited from much more testing than previous 2.x releases and is now considered usable for real-life projects. It continues improving at a fast pace, and bugs fixes or feature requests are usually handled quickly. For a more detailed discussion on the differences between Kst1 and Kst2, please refer to this page . 
Note that in the course of the port to Qt4, it was decided to base the core of Kst2 on Qt only for ease of distribution, especially to non-Linux platforms. Currently, Kst2 has no dependency on KDE, even though optional integration of some KDE features is being worked on to benefit those users using the KDE platform. 

Highlights of Kst2 compared with similar plotting tools (like xmgrace/QtGrace, qtiplot/SciDavis, LabPlot) are: 
- 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, Qimage-supported types) 
- very user-friendly with a modern, nice 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 allow comparing multiple experiments easily 
- active community, with over 300 commits since the previous release in November and an active mailing list 
- easily expandable for new data formats or data analysis algorithms thanks to a plugin-based architecture 
- available on Windows, Linux and Mac OSX 

The most notable improvements brought by Kst 2.0.3 over the 2.0.2 version released in November 2010 are: 
- cmake-based build system, with Windows, Mac OS X and Linux installers 
- many improvements in the reading of ASCII files: extensive UI overhaul and huge speedup 
- support for metadata added for netCDF files (scalar and string attributes) and ASCII (units and some data-file info) 
- UI improvements (new icons, consistency with KDE HIG guidelines, some dialogs reworked) 
- lots of bugs and crashes fixed in less-often used parts of the code 

We hope you will enjoy this release and help us further test and improve the tool. Kst has been developed over many years by professional developers and has reached a high level of maturity, with a very nice, future-proof code base. It was recently field-proven during the BLASTpol mission in Antarctica, during which the probably southern-most commit ever made landed in KDE's subversion repository! 

Please take the time to test kst, report the bugs you may find and tell your friends if you like it! 

The Kst Team 
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