TOPCAT release

[Mark Taylor]

Dear topcat users,

this is to announce a new release of topcat and friends:

   TOPCAT v4.4
   STILTS v3.1
   STIL   v3.2

The improvements are mostly visualisation related:

   - Some new plot types: 
        Grid: weighted 2-d histograms/density maps (quite flexible)
        Quantile: draws median lines through noisy data (and other things)
        Gaussian: fits a Gaussian to histogram-like data

   - More colour selection options
        Topcat now has a Free Colour Chooser widget that lets you
        pick any RGB colour for plot elements.
        Stilts now knows lots more colour names than it used to.

   - Topcat's Plot Form GUI has changed a bit
        It now uses a menu instead of the old toolbar, which had grown
        so many plot types it was getting too wide for the window

   - Better documentation for visualisation options:
        The user documents now have screenshots for all the plot types
        and shading modes, with example command lines for stilts.

And a couple of other things:

   - Fixed some anomalous behaviour relating to some crossmatch types
     (Combined/Sky+X[Y], Sky/Cartesian with errors).  The match scores
     are now more comparable, meaning that Best matches make more
     sense than they did.

   - Taplint now has a JSON output mode!  Who says I'm not down with
     the cool kids?

Downloads etc including version histories giving exhaustive details
of all changes (many minor items not mentioned above) are in the
usual places:

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

Thanks for your continued 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/