TOPCAT v4.1 release

[Mark Taylor]

Dear TOPCAT users,

this is to announce the following releases:

   TOPCAT v4.1    http://www.starlink.ac.uk/topcat/
   STILTS v2.5-2  http://www.starlink.ac.uk/stilts/

The main thing you'll notice is that the main topcat toolbar now
has buttons for the new-style plotting windows and not the old ones.
This is the first non-experimental release of the new plotting
windows, and they are now recommended over the old plotting windows.
You can find an introduction and a pointer to detailed documentation
for these windows on the topcat web page.

As well as some GUI rearrangements, there are considerable improvements
to these plotting windows since the last release v4.0-1, including:

   - major improvements in 2d and 3d navigation and documentation for it
   - histogram plot added
   - new option to visualise the results of a successful pair crossmatch
   - progress bar for large/slow plots

Changes between the old-style and new-style plot windows are too numerous
to list here.

The old-style plotting windows are now mildly deprecated and will not
be developed further, but if you still want them they can be found
in the Graphics menu.

Though the new plotting windows are a bit harder to drive, I'm hoping
people will get used to them without too much trouble and find the
additional capabilities worth the extra effort.  As well as the
current capabilites, they are much more extensible, so I'm very
receptive to requests for new visualisation functionality.

A couple of other noteworthy items:

   - Finally, TOPCAT can talk to the VAO/STScI registry
   - The embedded SAMP hub now supports HTTPS for Web SAMP clients

Changes in STILTS are fairly minor, though there's a new command
tloop for generating dummy table data.

Many other changes since the last release are listed in exhaustive detail
in the version histories on the respective web pages.

Bugs, comments, feedback of any kind welcome to me or the
topcat-user at bristol.ac.uk list.

Thanks for your continuing support.

Mark

--
Mark Taylor   Astronomical Programmer   Physics, Bristol University, UK
m.b.taylor at bris.ac.uk +44-117-9288776  http://www.star.bris.ac.uk/~mbt/