IDL 8.2 released!

IDL 8.2 is now available for download from the Exelis VIS website. It includes many enhancements—primarily in (New) Graphics and in the IDL widget toolkit—that help strengthen IDL 8. Here’s a list of some of the new/improved features in IDL 8.2, by category: Graphics

• COLORBAR: discrete, untethered, end caps
• Erase method
• Better thick line rendering
• DejaVu TrueType fonts with Unicode characters
• ARROW and SYMBOL are vectorized
• MAPGRID labeling
• LEGEND supports VECTOR plots
• AXIS: untethered, label orientations

Widget toolkit

• WIDGET_TREE: checkboxes, bitmap buttons, toggle state with space bar, set sensitivity of leaves
• WIDGET_BUTTON: can use RGBA bitmaps, improved appearance on Windows
• WIDGET_CONTROL: REDRAW keyword updates portions of a widget hierarchy

File access

• BigTIFF support on all platforms
• IDLffVideoWrite: can swap out VIS-supplied FFmpeg distro
• OPeNDAP support through netCDF-4 library on Mac OS X and Linux

Language

• JSON_PARSE and JSON_SERIALIZE functions
• Where method for List and Hash
• NULL keyword for ISA; null return from IDL_Container::Get

Workbench

• Duplicate routine checking in IDL’s path
• Drop-in plugin support
• ENVI extension wizard
• Updated text translations (de, es, fr, it, ja, ko, nl, pt_BR, ru, zh, zh_TW)
• Updates to code templates, project build dialog
• Limited content assist for Direct Graphics routines

Help system

• Revamped image analysis section with new examples
• Additional help on creating videos, swapping out FFmpeg library
• Improved layout of help pages with many new examples

I'll expand on this list and showcase what’s new in IDL 8.2 in a set of webinars on June 14. After you install IDL 8.2, please see the “What’s New in IDL 8.2” section linked from the main page of the IDL Help browser; it has a nice summary of the new/improved features with links to many examples. Finally (and I’m not sure I should mention this, but it’s true), there are many helpful bugfixes: I counted 25+ bugs that directly affected my work that are now fixed. In the coming weeks and months, I’ll show examples of the new and improved features in IDL 8.2, starting next week with a post about IDL’s native OPeNDAP support. Update: Registration information for the What's New in IDL 8.2 webinar is up on our Live Web Seminars page. See this more recent post for links to view the webinar recording and to download my slides and examples.