Apex a48 is live

The first update in a long time. This includes the planes UI I screencasted a few days ago, and plenty of other new bits in the UI and under the hood. The conversion away from DITL resources over to Interface builder nibs is complete. I’ll be screencasting more in the next few days.

Screencast demo of the new planes feature

Here’s a screencast I did showing the new UI for manipulating and exploring planes. There’s a high resolution version on Viddler, which really works great in full screen mode. When embedded in another page, like this YouTube link, its hard to see what’s on the screen.

I’ll be releasing a new version of Apex with this feature in it soon.

Moved the Blog to WordPress

This blog previously lived here:

http://homepage.mac.com/olof/tomographic/

Where the links should still be active. I’m trying to move the old content over here to WordPress.

Improvements in Apex a47

A number of improvements since the last update from a few months ago.

All dialogs have moved to .nib format.

QuickTime movie code to use the objective C APIs of QTKit. QTKit will be the supported QuickTime platform going forward for Apple, so its good to move there now.

OpenGL code now uses quite a bit more of the graphics card capability, so OpenGL images draw much more quickly. Also changed the lighting angle a little bit for more consistent colors using OpenGL.

Next will be code for viewing only a fraction of a dataset, so those large datasets are a little more manageable.

Improvements in Apex a46

The selection property of a document is now working as expected. This means one can set the selection with a command like this:

set the selection of document 1 to {34, 46, 47, 49, 56}

Which will select 5 ions, or clear the selection with

set the selection of document 1 to {}

The ‘select particles in sphere’ verb is implemented as part of the RDF plugin, and the export rdf command is working from a script as well:

tell document 1
set the selection 1 to {}
select particles in sphere centered at {0,0,100} with radius 10
export rdf saving in (“Macintosh HD:my folder” as alias) filename “rdf” relative to atomtype 2 total bins 500 radial cutoff 20
end tell

When importing a POS file, the selection is now correctly set to nil.

‘get coordinates of ion n’ now works as a shorthand for ‘get {x coordinate, y coordinate, z coordinate} of ion n’

Improvements in Apex a45

Apex a45 fixes the Atomtypes dialog. There were some drawing issues with this dialog that got a lot in one of the last few releases as I was updating to use more HIView based code. Its fixed now.

Improvements in Apex a44

Mostly, this update provides a select particles in sphere action as part of the new RDF plugin. Part of the reason to do this is to get an easy way to define a selection for an RDF to act on. It makes sense to do it in the RDF plugn so that test scripts for RDF can be guaranteed to have this feature available.

Now, select particles in sphere should really be part of the main application, but to do it right, one should be able to define a sphere object in the same way that you can define a cylinder or plane object. Actually, ellipsoid would be more general. That will be a little extra work, so for now, its just a simple function in the RDF plugin.

Improvements in Apex a42

The biggest feature here is that I fixed the sliders in the isosurface properties pane — the sliders weren’t working correctly. Now, not only are they working correctly, they are drawing really fast on live feedback. It’s really a great illustration of how the confidence sigma value improves the data along the edges.

More stuff here includes some under the hood work for intel doing reading of kozo format files. This shouldn’t affect most folks.

– Olof

Improvements in Apex a35

Apex a35 adds the ability to export to Rouen‘s Wide Data format, or the .ato file format.

Because the .ato file format includes a number of parameters which are specific to the detector and data acquisition, some of these fields are not filled in with real values. However, the file does contain the xyz positions and masses for the 3d atom probe data, and the evaporation voltage, if available.

Also, there was a bug that prevented Apex a34 from using the export to atomlist and export to .pos file options from the export menu. This bug has been fixed.

Improvements in Apex a34

Apex a34 fixes a bug which prevented smooth dragging of a window. Basically, Apex was not being smart about reusing the caches image in memory when the window position changed but the window size did not. Ah well.

I also made a change in the way drawing information is ordered in memory. This means a small speedup in drawing ( 5% or so, although I expected more).

Also, there is better auto redraw when zooming in and out. As a bonus, this action now gets recorded in Script Editor’s recording feature.