1 What's New?

In this section, we highlight the latest additions to map3d in the (vain?) hope that people will read at least this much of the manual and be able to quickly make use of the latest and greatest that the program offers.

1.1 Version 6.0: March, 2004

This is the first version of the ``new'' map3d with a GTK-based GUI. We are getting even closer to the functionality of the old GL based version. Even more important, there are also several new interactive features unique to the OpenGL+GTK version.

Some of the specific things that you should notice over previous versions include:

New look and feel:

with the move from GLUT to gtk has come a whole new look and feel for map3d. Fonts are new and much nicer than before and all the menus and dialog boxes have a cleaner, more professional look than before.

New GUIs:

There are several new GUIs that you can open through the menus. Perhaps the most prominent is the ``Files Dialog'', through which you can interactively load and reload files and data windows. There is also a scaling dialog, from which you can change the scaling parameters with one click, and a saving dialog where you can save geometry and images (soon to have state-saving and movie-saving features).

Interactive Control:

Now you can select one of many parameters to adjust by pressing the + or - key, including font sizes, contour thickness, etc.

Keyboard Transformations:

Now you can use the keyboard to rotate, translate and scale, and even edit nodes' positions in your geometry.

Bug fixes:

not that the previous version had any bugs, but we found a few(!) things to fix.

1.2 In the works (``vapourware'')

A small sampler of things that are in the works:

• Reading of Time Series container files.
• Proper reading of the container files in the graphicsio file system.
• Dynamic menus that indicate the current parameter selections (in progress).
• Saving and reading settings to keep your favorite settings around next time.
• Remote Control of the animations and user interventions for making videos.
• New display modes for the display of vectors.
• We are trying to fix the bugs listed on the bugs page (see Section 10) as quickly as we can.