TOPCAT/STILTS release

[Mark Taylor]

Dear TOPCAT/STILTS users,

this is to announce new releases:

   TOPCAT v3.6
   STILTS v2.2

You can find downloads and additional information at the usual places:

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

Significant upgrades are:

   Session and Multi-Table save/load (TOPCAT):
      From the Save Window, as well as the old behaviour of saving the
      current table to a file, you now have two new options:
      Save multiple tables to a single container file, or save the
      TOPCAT session to a single container file.  These are similar,
      but in the latter case subsets, hidden columns, sort orders etc
      are saved as well as the table data itself.  When a file saved
      in this way is loaded, all the tables will be loaded in.

   Multi-table copy (STILTS):
      There are new STILTS commands tmulti and tmultin which can copy
      multiple input files to a single container output file
      (typically multi-extension FITS or multi-TABLE VOTable).

   System Browser (TOPCAT):
      The TOPCAT load and save windows now have a new button "System Browser"
      which can be used as an alternative to the old Filestore Browser
      button.  It lets you use your platform's native OS file browser,
      which may give Mac and Windows users a more familiar and convenient
      experience.

   Rename/Delete Row Subsets (TOPCAT):
      At long last, the Subset Window provides options for deleting and
      renaming subsets.  Apologies to those who've been asking that this
      has taken so long to implement.

   JSAMP upgrade:
      The JSAMP library used is now v1.1; amongst other things it means
      that if you're using Java 1.6 on a suitable desktop, a SAMP Hub
      started from TOPCAT will show up as an icon in the "System Tray".

There are a number of other minor enhancements and bugfixes as well.
For details see the respective version histories:

    http://www.starlink.ac.uk/topcat/sun253/versions.html
    http://www.starlink.ac.uk/stilts/sun256/versions.html

Finally, from this version, TOPCAT and STILTS require version 1.5 of the
Java Runtime Environment to run - they are no longer compatible with 1.4.
1.4 is now very old, so I don't expect this to cause problems, but I'm
interested to hear if that's not the case.

As usual, I'm happy to hear any comments, questions, problems etc either
on the topcat-user mailling list or to me direct.

Best wishes,

Mark

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