New (final?) release of TOPCAT and friends

[Mark Taylor]

This is to announce the release of a new version of TOPCAT, the
VOTable- and VO-friendly graphical table analysis and processing
application.

Some of the new features are as follows:

TOPCAT V1.6
===========

   - Crossmatching using sky coordinates has been greatly speeded up.
     This also fixes a small correctness bug in the sky matching
     and permits larger tables to be matched for a given memory size.

   - More activation actions (triggered when you click on a plotted 
     point or displayed row) have been added.  You can now display a 
     relevant web page or execute some OS-specific command as well as 
     the existing options (view image, cutout, spectrum etc).

   - A new set of algebraic functions has been added for converting
     between time formats (MJD and ISO8601).

   - Message logging has been tidied up and made more configurable;
     for one thing this will reduce the amount of garbage printed to
     the console in some circumstances.

   - TOPCAT now operates as a SOAP server capable of displaying tables
     presented to it using SOAP messages by external applications.


There are also new releases of the related products:

   STIL   V2.3-1  (Generic table/VOTable I/O and processing library)
   STILTS V0.2b   (Command-line generic table/VOTable processing utilities)

these contain fewer changes - see the web pages for more detail.


These releases are dated 30 June 2005.  Recent funding decisions by the
UK's Particle Physics and Astronomy Research Council mean that the
Starlink project, under which this software has been developed, will
cease to exist after that date.  I am hoping to secure some funding
which will enable me to continue to support and develop these items
in the future, but at the moment this is uncertain.


For more information see the relevant web pages:

   http://www.starlink.ac.uk/topcat/
   http://www.starlink.ac.uk/stil/
   http://www.starlink.ac.uk/stilts/

Mark

-- 
Mark Taylor    Starlink Programmer     Physics,  Bristol University, UK
m.b.taylor at bris.ac.uk +44-117-928-8776 http://www.star.bris.ac.uk/~mbt/