Dear All,

Firstly, I would like to apologise to the very many of you who (like me) 
will receive more than one copy of this email and especially to those of 
you who receive multiple copies of this email and have absolutely no 
interest in the RTM. Please delete and move on, I hope never to bother 
you with unwanted email again.

Part of the reason that many people will receive multiple copies of this 
email is that, so far, we have not had a mailing list with which to 
communicate with RTM users. We have now rectified this and I would 
encourage anybody who uses the RTM for demos etc to join the new 
RTM-users list through the web page at:

https://mailman.ic.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/rtm-users

It is through this list that we would like to communicate with users in 
the future. If we are planning any temporary short interruptions of 
service or similar then then it will be announced via this list. This 
way we can try to avoid clashing with anybody's big demo. Also if you 
have requests, ideas or problems with hardware etc then please mail this 
list. If you wish to contact us without using the list then the 
[log in to unmask] address will continue to work.

A great deal of effort has gone into improving the RTM this year. During 
the first half of the year this was centred around trying to make the 
back end more stable and scalable and this will continue as we move over 
to the new messaging system etc. However over the summer we have tried 
to improve the RTM client. This has involved almost a complete re-write 
   of the client code and we now have an early "beta" version available 
to test and we would encourage people to try it and give us feedback. 
The current beta version is available from:

http://gridportal-ws01.hep.ph.ic.ac.uk/software/3D_RTM_2.xx/Windows/

Some notes on the new version:

- This is based on the latest NASA worldwind SDK. The previous version 
was based on what is now an antiquated version for which we were clearly 
not going to get any support for problems (such as incompatibility with 
various graphics cards).

- Not all the functionality is currently in this version. It is a beta 
after a significant re-write after all. If you have any particular 
favourite features that you want added quickly then send them to the 
list. We wanted to get the beta version out asap so that we get feedback 
and find problems.

- The new version is an improvement in many ways on the older version, 
not just an update of the SDK. The overall structure is much better and 
many specific minor problem have been fixed, one (minor) example is that 
several race conditions which meant that you would sometimes have to 
click multiple times to get the desired response are no longer there.

- If you initially see no earth at all just the sites then do not worry. 
In this version the images are downloaded and cached rather than going 
in the initial download. This has many advantages.

- The application now launches in its own window which can be resized 
etc. This has been one of the most common requests for the RTM. This 
means, for example, that you can run multiple instances if you are 
driving more than one display from the same computer (which is often the 
case at exhibitions). One slight downside is that if you run this "full 
screen" then it has a border. We are working on a borderless version 
that to which you give a pre-determined size with a start up option.

- The beta version is windows only at the moment. Those of you who are 
experienced Mac users will know how to port it. We will release a Mac 
version (hopefully) next week for those of you who aren't.

- We will make the svn repository available (read only) so that people 
can download the source code sometime in the next couple of weeks.

- We currently have no branding on the main display, but these are on 
their way so the kind people who have funded this effort over the years 
will be acknowledged (as they are on the previous version).

- We know that the RTM web pages are an unhelpful mess and we are 
preparing much clearer and cleaner pages. However, these will appear 
over the next couple of weeks and we wanted to get feedback on this new 
version without waiting for these to be ready.

All the best,
david