An update on the next release

Hi all

It's been 18 months or so since the last VStar release.

That's unusual. That's the longest gap since the first release in November 2009.

In part it's because I have a lot going on, in part because there have been numerous different threads of development, documentation, and testing (some of which are evident from forum posts) and not just by me but others including Cliff Kotnik, Dave Hinzel, and Max P (Maksym Pyatnytskyy).

Soon I will make a candidate release available to testers.

If anyone is interested in getting early acess to a candidate release to test it and provide feedback about any problems found or to write plugins for new plugin categories, please let us know here.

There are still some new plugins that need documentation written for them. If you'd like to help with that or provide feedback when that's available, that would also be appreciated.

I thought you might be interested in an overview of what to expect in the new release.

• The AID load dialog has been extended to provide more control over what is loaded, enabled by Patrick Wills enhancements to the web service. Thanks to Patrick and others at HQ like Sara and Bert who have put up with my requests.
• Two new plugin categories:
  • observation sink, enabling files to be saved to arbitrary formats (e.g. an AAVSO Upload Format File save plugin could be written);
  • observation transformer, enabling arbitrary modification of loaded observations; this incorporates undoable edits (i.e. undo/redo).
• Addition of model creation (including polynomial fit) to the scripting API.
• Improvements to the observation list search pane to allow either regular expressions or VeLa expressions.
• Some of the new plugins are as follows, one of which has already been mentioned:
  • HJD converter
  • VeLa observation transformer
  • VeLa model creator
  • Magnitude baseline shifter
  • ASAS-SN observation source
  • Extended text file format observation source
• More flexibility in which loaded datasets are converted to HJD via a plugin instead of automatic conversion. This is something Sebastian Otero expressed interest in quite awhile ago and a more recent question from Mike Miller broght me back to it.
• Various bug fixes by myself and others, including Cliff and Max.
• User manual updates.

David