Mark Taylor wrote:
> Dear TOPCAT users,
> 
> I am planning in the very near future (probably about a week) to 
> release TOPCAT v2.0.  Since most of you have provided me with 
> helpful comments in the past, I'm sending this pointer to a 
> pre-release version in case you would like to take a look and 
> report bugs or suggestions.  Bugs and minor suggestions I'd hope
> to address before release, more substantial things I'll consider for
> a future version.  Of course there's no obligation - you're welcome 
> to wait until the proper release, any feedback after that will 
> be very welcome too.
> 
> If you're still reading...
> 
> You can find the pre-release version at
> 
>    ftp://andromeda.star.bris.ac.uk/pub/star/topcat/v2.0-pre/
> 
> which contains the topcat-full.jar and topcat-lite.jar files
> (topcat-lite is sufficient for most things) which you can use 
> standalone (java -jar) or in conjunction with the shell script
> 'topcat' (just stick it in the same directory as one or both of 
> the jar files).  Although the new release contains 3D functionality,
> you don't need to install Java3D or anything like that - any 
> J2SE 1.4 or 1.5 installation should do.
> 
> The documentation (including on-line help) is not up to date with 
> respect to this version, which means amongst other things that "?"
> toolbar buttons may be absent or give you misleading information
> (though nearly all the non-graphics documentation is still correct),
> and that you'll get "WARNING: Unknown help ID" messages.  I will
> address this between now and release.
> 
> In the absence of proper documentation, here is the crash course on
> TOPCAT v2 new features:
> 
>    - The (2D) Scatter Plot window is now joined by (1D) Histogram,
>      3D Cartesian, 3D Spherical and (2D) Density Plot.
> 
>    - All these graphics windows can be opened using the button on 
>      the main Control Window toolbar, or equivalently the corresponding
>      options in the Graphics menu.
> 
>    - Unlike in v1, instances of these windows are not now "owned" by
>      a particular table.  However, to preserve similar behaviour to
>      previous versions, if you open one of the plotting windows while
>      a given table is highlighted in the Table List, it will start out
>      displaying data from that table.
> 
>    - You can display more than one plot on the same set of axes.
>      In v1.*, you could only do this by giving different symbols to
>      different row subsets, but all the points on a given graphics
>      window had to be from the same pair of columns in the same table.
>      Now you can overplot as many different sets of columns from the same
>      or different tables as you like - for instance plot V-R vs. R
>      and V-B vs. R on the same plot, or RA vs Dec for points from 
>      three different tables.  To do this, hit the green "+" button on the
>      bottom left of the plot window, and you'll get a new tab to fill
>      in a table and column names.  You can move between sets of controls 
>      using the tabs along the top of this panel.
>      The first ("Main") tab defines what labels are plotted on the axes.
> 
>    - The column selectors now allow you to type in column names
>      as an alternative to selecting them from the drop-down list.
>      There are two main reasons why you might want to do this:
>      (1) you've got a very wide table where it's fiddly to scroll
>          to the column you're after
>      (2) it doesn't need to be a column name that you type in, you
>          can type in any of the algebraic expressions involving 
>          column names that you'd use when defining a new column
> 
>    - Some of the selectors (e.g. column selectors) have little "< >" 
>      arrows next to them.  You can use these to cycle through the
>      available options.
> 
>    - You have detailed control over how each data set (that is each
>      row subset within each table/column selection tab) is plotted.
>      In the Row Subsets scroller (bottom right) of any graphics window)
>      you can now see the legend icon on a button next to each subset.
>      If you click on this button you'll get a pop-up dialogue 
>      which lets you change things like marker shape, size, colour,
>      transparency etc.  The details of what you can change depend
>      on the type of plot.  The default plotting styles are determined
>      by characteristics of the table that the plot window is opened
>      with (basically: big blobs if there are few rows, tiny transparent
>      ones if there are very many).  You can change this default 
>      (hence change the styles for all the visible sets) using the 
>      Marker Style menu as before.
> 
>    - For the 2D scatter plot this style editor dialogue allows you to
>      plot lines as well as/instead of marking points.  You can 
>      either have "Dot to Dot" which joins successive points with straight
>      lines or Linear Correlation which plots a regression line and
>      reports the coefficients.
>      Caution: don't try dot-to-dot on a million row table!
> 
>    - There's some useful information in the bottom panel (number of 
>      points plotted, position in window).  Sometimes truncated, you
>      might need to widen the window to see it all.
> 
>    - Plotting performance and memory requirements have been improved
>      considerably for large tables.
> 
> There are a few other things, but that's enough to be going on with.
> I hope that most things are fairly intuitive, so given you have some
> familiarity with the kind of job TOPCAT is trying to do, just looking
> and playing should point you in the right direction.  Taking a look
> at the tools in the toolbar (hover over for tool tips) or menus is 
> a good bet for finding out what you can do.
> 
> Giving the "-demo" flag on the command line will (as usual) start the 
> program up with a couple of small demo files.   You can find one or
> two more substantial ones in 
> 
>    ftp://andromeda.star.bris.ac.uk/pub/star/topcat/data/
> 
> though obviously you're more likely to pick up problems I haven't
> seen if you can use your own data.
> 
> Many thanks to anyone who takes a look.
> 
> Mark
> 
Has STIL been updated too?

Steve.