TOPCAT release

[Mark Taylor]

Dear colleagues,

this is to announce a new release of TOPCAT and co.:

   TOPCAT v4.7
   STILTS v3.2
   STIL   v3.4

Please note that at this release the required Java version is Java 8
(previous releases targeted Java 6).  Since Java 8 has been around
since 2014, and Java 6 has been effectively unsupported by Oracle 
since 2013, most users won't even notice this change.
If you try to run the new version and fails saying something about a
java.lang.UnsupportedClassVersionError then you will need to upgrade 
your Java installation to Java 8 or any later version; otherwise 
you're already OK.  If this causes major problems for anybody,
please let me know.

A couple of highlights of this release:

  - Visualisation is now multithreaded.  If you are making plots for
    of large (>1e5 row) tables on a multi-core machine, you should 
    find interactive response (zoom, pan, adjust config options etc)
    substantially faster than before.  Note however that this doesn't 
    apply to the initial plot preparation (before you start interacting).
    Looks out for more parallelisation in future releases.

  - Hips2fits access.  There are now Activation Actions that let you
    display or send via SAMP cutouts from any of the 700+ available
    HiPS image surveys; that makes it easy to, e.g., view a postage 
    stamp of imagery from a given survey for every row you click on.
    This function relies on the excellent Hips2fits service from CDS
    (http://alasky.u-strasbg.fr/hips-image-services/hips2fits).

Plus lots more of course; detailed change logs can be found on the
web pages.

Downloads etc in the usual places:

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

Thanks!  Any feedback gratefully received as usual.

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/