TOPCAT, STILTS, STIL releases

[Mark Taylor]

Dear users of TOPCAT/STILTS/STIL,

there are new releases of TOPCAT, STILTS and STIL:

   - TOPCAT v3.7              http://www.starlink.ac.uk/topcat/
   - STILTS v2.2-1            http://www.starlink.ac.uk/stilts/
   - STIL v3.0                http://www.starlink.ac.uk/stil/

TOPCAT improvements include:

   - Major overhaul of load dialogues (you can see progress in rows
     loaded, dialogues are no longer modal so you can do other things
     during a load, load cancelling works better)

   - Virtual Observatory Registry query enhancements (better options
     for specifying queries, default query options more likely to
     give the results you want)
     [Note: as of today, the main AstroGrid registry (default) and the
      NVO registry don't seem to be working properly, so try the
      alternative AstroGrid or the Euro-VO registry if you have problems]

   - Searchable Help (you can now do a text search of the full
     documentation in the help browser)

   - BaSTI load dialogue (access to INAF Bag of Stellar Tracks and
     Isochrones database)

STIL has a major upgrade to v3.0 including some backwards
incompatibilities - people writing code that uses STIL should
see the documentation for details.

There are also a number of bugfixes and smaller enhancements in all three
packages.  As usual, detailed information on all the changes is available
in the change logs:

   TOPCAT:  http://www.starlink.ac.uk/topcat/sun253/versions.html
   STILTS:  http://www.starlink.ac.uk/stilts/sun256/versions.html
   STIL:    http://www.starlink.ac.uk/stil/sun252/history.html

Any comments or queries on any of these packages, please get in
touch with me direct (m.b.taylor at bristol.ac.uk) or via the 
mailing list (topcat-user at bristol.ac.uk - see
http://www.star.bris.ac.uk/~mbt/topcat-lists.html).

In other news: for the first six months of 2011, TOPCAT will be
supported by GAVO, the German Astrophysical Virtual Observatory
(http://www.g-vo.org/).  This support is gratefully acknowledged.

A merry Christmas to all our readers!

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/
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