Version 3.4
Post date: Nov 10, 2011 5:06:21 PM
Version 3.4.7, 21 Jul 2010:
(PB/V/S) Dropped the concept of generic attributes and attribute types for hub objects like views and data folders. Instead, author composes a description for the hub itself and each of its navigation views. The description is written in a restricted version of HTML markup, with support for basic text styling (bold, italic, underline, subscript, and superscript) and key document formatting elements (paragraph, headings h1 to h3, unordered lists, and ordered lists). The Hub Editor component in Portal Builder has been updated accordingly. The Attributes tables have been removed, and two new buttons raise a modal dialog by which the author can review and edit the HTML description of the hub itself or the currently selected view. This dialog encapsulates a simple WYSIWYG editor that supports the aforementioned limited set of HTML markup. Revised Matlab utility datanavhub(), removing attribute-related operations that are no longer supported.
Version 3.4.6, 07 Jul 2010:
(PB/V/S) Instead of retrieving datasets from the portal server one at a time, the local client now requests all the datasets it needs. The server will return a subset of the requested data if it exceeds a threshold size, in which case the client must issue a new request for the remaining datasets. This change improves the performance and responsiveness of the Hub Browser component of Portal Builder and the Portal Viewer applet.
(PB/S) Fixed a minor bug in how the portal hub caches information on placeholder datasets in a view template figure.
Version 3.4.5, 11 Jun 2010:
(PB/V) Updated the Hub Browser component and the Portal Viewer applet to support retrieval and display of attributes for the current view instance from a remote portal hub. Fixed a thread synchronization bug in the applet.
Version 3.4.4, 09 Jun 2010:
(FC, PB/V) Fixed bug in boundary-box calculations for horizontal axis and Z axis.
(FC, PB/V/S) Added two new color map lookup table options for the Z-axis's cmap attribute. These are comparable to Matlab's "jet" colormap and its reverse.
(FC, PB/V) Fixed a couple minor bugs in the DataNav Postscript rendering of heatmaps.
(PB/V) Fixed minor bug in code that injects datasets to "instantiate" a view. Increased the maximum number of wildcards ("*") in a view's browse path from 4 to 6.
Version 3.4.3, 17 May 2010:
(FC, PB) Again revised implementation of the notion of a current directory/file in the custom file chooser dialog used to select a figure file or a dataset source file from the file system. Now the chooser queries the user's workspace to find up to five most recently used (MRU) directories containing figure files and up to five MRU directories containing dataset source files. For figure-related operations (open, save, or export to PS/PNG/JPEG), the chooser initially selects the figure file currently being viewed (if any). Else, it will select an "Untitled" figure with a compatible extension in the most recently used figure directory. As a last resort, it will start up in the user's home directory. For dataset-related operations, the chooser initially selects the most recently used (and existing) dataset source file. If there is no such entity, it will start up in the most recently used figure directory. Again, as a last resort, it will start up in the user's home directory. For all chooser operations, the directory path combo box in the chooser dialog now includes the MRU directories (if any) containing figure files or dataset source files (depending on the file operation). These appear at the bottom of the dropdown list, providing a quicker means to navigate to MRU directories.
(FC, PB) Addressed a problem with the workspace path cache. In previous versions, if a file or directory in the cache did not exist when Figure Composer or Portal Builder started (or when the background monitor daemon checked it), its path was removed immediately, no longer available via the Workspace Browser. This is a problem when a file/directory is temporarily unavailable due to a network outage or mounting issue. Now, when a most recently used file or a workspace directory is found to be missing, its path is retained in the cache but marked as "unavailable". Unavailable MRUs and workspace directories are hidden from the user in the Workspace Browser and the Open Recent menu. If they should become available later, they will reappear. Unavailable files and directories are maintained in the path cache file until they've been "stale" for a week.
(PB/V) Modified the default behavior of the view and browse node selection combo boxes in the Hub Browser under Mac OS X. Now, as long as the combo box has the keyboard focus, the user can use the up and down arrow keys to automatically increment or decrement its currently selected item.
(PB) Added drag-n-drop gesture on each Attributes table in the Hub Editor to permit rearranging the order of attributes assigned to a hub object.
(PB) The browse tree error message (if any) is now displayed in the Dataset Mappings section on the Construct tab of the Hub Editor as well as on its Preview tab. That way the user will know if there's something wrong with the current view definition without having to switch to the Preview tab.
Augmented the Matlab utility function datanavhub() to support some additional operations on the user's local workspace portal: removing a hub, creating a hub view, and defining hub attribute types and attribute values. Also modified the function so that is has no return value. Instead, it throws a Matlab exception with an appropriate error message if any problem is detected. The required datanavhub.m file and supporting JAR files are now available for public use.
Version 3.4.2, 07 May 2010:
(FC, PB/V) Introduced Enable image smoothing? flag for the heatmap element. If disabled, the simple "nearest-neighbor" interpolation algorithm is used when the heatmap is rendered, resulting in a blocky image. If enabled, a bicubic interpolation smooths the heatmap image when it is scaled up during rendering. The result looks "nicer", but it can give the impression that the underlying data is smoother than it really is. In prior versions, the heatmap image was always smoothed -- so heatmaps in existing figures will have this flag enabled. The Postscript rendering is also smoothed or not, but the algorithm for smoothing depends on the Postscript device (note that some older Postscript printers may lack support for smooth image interpolation).
Version 3.4.1, 31 Mar 2010:
(FC, PB/V/S) Fixed bug in the figure document schema that would prevent Figure Composer from reading in valid files in which the cmode attribute was explicitly specified for the zaxis element.
Version 3.4.0, 22 Mar 2010:
(FC, PB) The File | About dialog now includes information about the host operating system and the JVM under which the application is running.
(FC, PB) The file chooser dialog for opening/saving/exporting figures and loading/exporting datasets now starts out in the directory containing the figure file that is currently on display -- if that figure has been saved to the file system. If not, the chooser starts out in the same directory it was in the last time it was used. If that directory no longer exists, it will start out in the parent directory of the most recently used existing figure file. At last resort, the chooser will start up in the user's home directory.
(FC, PB) The widget-heavy Property Editor has been given a "face lift" of sorts so that it takes up less space horizontally. This was done in an effort to free up more space for the Figure Canvas when Figure Composer is run on a laptop with a small screen. It may take users a little while to get accustomed to the new layout.
(FC) Bug fixed: Exception thrown when exporting a data trace to a new .dna file -- causing Figure Composer to freeze because an uncancellable modal progress dialog is left hanging, blocking the rest of the user interface.
(FC, PB/V) Changed heatmap rendering so that Postscript and onscreen rendering are the same. In previous versions, an ill-defined data (NaN or infinity) in the heatmap image were mapped to a completely transparent pixel in the onscreen rendering, while in Postscript it mapped to the last (index = 255) entry of the colormap specified in the graph's color axis. Rather than introduce transparency in Postscript, we decided to map all ill-defined data in a heatmap to colormap index 0, and all well-defined data are mapped to [1..255]. The author controls the color at index 0 via a new attribute defined on the graph's color axis -- the so-called "NaN color".
(PB) Implemented an internal "drag-and-drop" gesture on the hub table so that the user can easily: (a) rearrange the order of the hubs within the local portal's hub list; (b) rearrange the order of the hubs within the remote portal's hub list; (c) upload a local hub to a particular location within the remote portal's hub list.
(PB) Implemented an internal "drag-and-drop" gesture on the hub data repository tree so that the user can easily rearrange the tree in permissible ways (one cannot move a data folder under one of its descendant folders, of course!).
(PB/V/S) Introduced support for defining attributes on a hub, hub view, or hub data folder. The Hub Editor component now includes two attribute tables, one for the currently selected view and one for the currently selected data folder. User double-clicks on the table to raise a modal popup by which he can add new attributes to the table, and edit and/or remove existing ones. The popup also includes a panel for defining new attribute types and removing attribute types (along with all existing attributes of that type). Attributes are maintained on a per-hub basis in a single "attribute repository" file in the hub's backing store. The Hub Browser component collects the attributes for the current displayed instance of a hub view and displays them in a hidable panel to the right of the canvas in which the view instance itself is rendered. Currently, however, the public portal viewer does not support displaying attributes; the whole "attributes" concept is still under development...
(FC, PB; Mac OS X-specific) The v3.3.0 application bundles failed to run on both Steve's and Jenn's Mac OS X laptops. Part of the problem may have been the older JavaApplicationStub file that was included in that application bundle. This native executable did not include support for the newer x86_64 architecture. As of this version, the stub file in the Mac OS X application bundles supports three architectures: ppc, x86, and x86_64.
(FC) WARNING: Figure Composer now requires a Java 6 (1.6.x) runtime environment. It will exit immediately at startup if run on a pre-1.6 JVM.