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CDAT Newsletter, May 2008

CDAT Newsletter, April 2008, home

CDAT Newsletter

Vol.5, May, 2008

The birth of CDAT 5.0

The new CDAT 5.0 Beta has been released. The older version CDAT 4.3 is still available, although it is not supported any more, and eventually it will become obsolete.

New features included in CDAT 5.0:

- new installation (configure)
- new VCDAT - Lite mode
- interactive plot Edit Mode
- TrueType fonts system
- direct postscript, PNG, pdf, other
- MPEG animation
- improved CDAT Demo
- new inline CDAT HELP

CDAT 5.0 uses NumPy module (the Numeric is no longer supported!) and it works with Python 2.5+ versions.

Because of the changes coming with NumPy, CDAT 5.0 has new modules cdms2 and MV2 and the old cdms and MV modules are now deprecated. The automatic conversion program is supplied to help you with the transition from the pre-CDAT 5.0 to the post CDAT 5.0 programming with the new modules.

News - CDAT HELP

We are excited to introduce the new CDAT Help application into the CDAT distribution.

CDAT Help lets you find the documentation about the methods and classes from the CDAT source code.

To start CDAT Help, in your shell prompt just type

% cdathelp

This will start a new application

Future CDAT 5.x

Here is what we see in CDAT's future:

- support for NetCDF 4.x formats
(with compression, parallel read/write and support for different grids)
- HDF5 full compatibility
- Google Earth interface to CDAT
- VisTrails (a new scientific workflow management system)
- PyVisus
- Ultra Scale Visualization
- CF 1.x or 2.0 (including CF Gridspec and CMOR2 support)
- SBIR -generalized grid viewer (3D) and regridder
- integration with ESG-CET as back-end visualization/analysis tool.

Tech Tips for beginners

Working with axis pins in VCDAT

There is a new feature in VCDAT that we want to turn your attention to. Next to the axis there are now little icons of the pin. It can be used to pin/unpin the axis. If you need to work with the slice in time and pressure for example, you can zoom in on the slice and then pin this dimension. This way any variable you will subsequently work with, will automatically have this dimension zoomed.

Advanced Tech Tips

Editing plots with the new VCS canvas GUI

We are very excited to introduce the brand new feature in VCDAT - namely the canvas GUI that lets you edit the plot, move the text with drag and drop capability and change the text with a double click. The new feature is introduced in the CDAT 5.0 release.

You can work either with the standard canvas, or the new canvas GUI. You cannot have both at the same time, so you need to first select the option to have you canvas appear as the GUI canvas.

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