I’m happy to announce that IDL 8.2.1 is now available for download from our website, exelisvis.com. This maintenance release includes updates to, primarily, (New) Graphics, the widget toolkit and the Workbench.
Here’s a more detailed listing of improvements:
Graphics
- Added ColorBrewer color tables and a new COLORTABLE function (see last week’s post)
- ‘exponent’ and ‘scientific’ tick units
- HISTOGRAM property for PLOT
- Keywords to NG routines can be abbreviated
- RELATIVE keyword for positioning annotations in a multiplot
- Specify AXIS location with strings ‘left’, ‘right’, ‘top’, ‘bottom’ and ‘center’
- Can add a colorbar and a legend from the NG toolbar
- Can override the NG event handlers, providing an object
Language
- START keyword for *INDGEN routines
- Support for Proleptic Gregorian calendar with GREG2JUL and JUL2GREG routines
File Access
- CDF library upgraded to 3.4.0
- Can write netCDF-3 (classic) files larger than 2 GB
Widgets
- Can arrow through a WIDGET_COMBOBOX and get events
- WIDGET_TABLE cells can generate events when not editable
- Can scroll a WIDGET_TREE with the mouse wheel
Workbench
- IDL Class Hierarchy view for viewing properties and methods of super- and subclasses
- Macros! Can make custom macros and launch them from toolbar buttons or accelerator keys
- Redo button (hi, Linda!)
I’ve prepared a set of programmatic examples that demonstrate most of these improvements. Please download them from here [ZIP, ~4 MB].
Last, an editorial. Though 8.2.1 includes bug fixes (52 CRs closed), we’re also adding several new features, so it feels like more than just a maintenance release. I think this is a result of us getting better at the “release early, release often” software philosophy.
I discovered a bunch of new features of IDL 8 yesterday: the plot function, lists, hashes, and foreach. Simply hadn’t encountered them up til now. Is there any place these are documented online (not just the IDL “online” help)? Is there any easy way / guide to transition from the plot procedure to the plot function? These changes are pretty neat, but the textbook I’m teaching from is out of date (it had to be printed, after all).
Please allow me just a few days — I should have a satisfactory answer for you on Monday October 8.
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I thought I would just play with a few features. Honestly, this is the *first* thing I tried. I don’t know why function graphics hate me so much!
Here is what the documentation for the BACKGROUND keyword to the new ColorTable function says (somewhat oddly, I might add): “Set this keyword to a string or three-element array describing the colors of the table. Default value is [0, 0, 0].”
I thought I would try a yellow, so I typed this, directly from the example in the docs:
IDL> ctable = COLORTABLE([[085,026,139],[135,206,255],[0,255,0]], $
NCOLORS = levels, /TRANSPOSE, Background=[255,255,0])
% COLORTABLE: BACKGROUND must be a RGB triplet or string
% Execution halted at: $MAIN$
Sigh….
Here’s an updated version of colortable.pro.
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Mark,
If you’re an ENVI+IDL user, can you update your IDL version without updating your ENVI version? Because if you can’t, the “release early, release often” strategy seems lost on those of us who use IDL in conjunction with ENVI more than anything.
Jeff
Hi Jeff,
The direct answer is likely no, but to avoid this problem (which has bitten us in the past), we’re now concurrently releasing all products built on IDL; in this case, ENVI 5.0 SP1 and E3De 3.1 are both built on IDL 8.2.1.
mp