earth-20100920

This release adds some exciting new features. JMARS now automatically saves its current state once a minute, and you can restore the last state when logging in. The map window can now be saved to a TIFF or JPEG2000 file. The function keys can be used to activate layers for faster interaction with the map. The places menu has new back/foreward buttons and a History menu, to make navigation easier. The shape layer can now save its state into .jlf and .jmars session files, work with circles, show tooltips of selected columns, use transparent colors, has much improved csv and kml handling, includes a lookup table operator to aid in symbolizing shape files, and has an alternate "geotools" shapefile reader that can handle projected and much larger files. The map layer has a new Threshold operation that hides pixels at, above, or below a specified value. And much more!

Core changes

• JMARS now automatically saves the place history and active layers once per minute; you may choose to restore the last autosave when logging in.
• The Help menu now has links to the JMARS website forums and release notes.
• Places menu now has options to export to csv, and back / foreward buttons bound to alt-left and alt-right on the keyboard. There is a history menu as well, so users can visually see where they have been, and like a browser history, use either the back/foreward options or the menu to move around.
• The F1-F10 keys may now be used to switch both the layer manager tab and the active layer when the user is focused on the map window. This makes it possible to rapidly interact with different layers without moving the mouse away from the map.
• There is a new Export Image option in the File menu that may be used to export TIFF, PNM, WBMP, RAW, and JPEG 2000 images.
• The status bar that shows longitude and latitude of the mouse cursor now includes the degree symbol after each measurement.
• A .jmars session file now includes the active layer, so sessions will remember what layer was selected in the layer manager.
• Fixed issue where toggling the tooltip options in the View menu had no affect on whether tooltips were actually shown.
• Fixed the View menu's Dock All Tabs option; it was docking tabs in the reverse order they had been in.

Shape Layer

• Shape layers may now be saved in a .jmars session file or jlf file. The untitled collection's contents, which files to reload, auto-calculated column settings, and styles are all saved and restored.
• The feature table is a little more pleasant to look at, and empty cells now show up as the italic text 'null', instead of a dark gray hole in the table.
• Hovering over shapes may now show a popup display of select values from the table for that shape. Use the Tooltips option in the shape layer Settings menu to control the columns to display.
• Added support for circles to the shape layer. To create circles, use the new 'Add Circles' context menu option by right clicking on the map. Since few file formats support real circles, a column must be chosen to hold the size of each circle, and the units of the column must be provided. Then just drag the mouse from one edge of the circle to the other. To edit circles, switch to Edit Features mode in the context menu; drag the circle edge to resize, drag the circle interior to recenter. See the 'Edit Circles' option in the Features menu to change the column or units later.
• Color transparency may now be set in the feature table and style editor.
• Added new 'Lookup Table' as a column type, to simplify table-based symbolizing of shape files. Direct value lookup is useful to generate styles for each shape based on a column that indicates some kind of classification. Breakpoints are useful to symbolically group shapes together that have numerically adjacent values (like representing nomenclature diameter with a set of specific point sizes.) Interpolating tables can be very useful to generate gradient values based on a number column, for example fill color determined by map-sampled thermal inertia.
• Shapes are now indexed. Reprojection and changing the active file can take a little longer but panning and zooming in huge datasets is now much faster.
• The Z Order menu has a new option "Use Table Order for All Features" that orders all features to match the sort done in the feature table. This allows users to change the order features are rendered and exported to shape files based on the order they appear in the table at the moment this option is chosen.
• Added a shape layer shapefile format called 'geotools shp', that can read and write ESRI shapefiles. Compared with the existing ESRI shapefile format, it solves several problems:
  • It streams from shp and dbf files, so it can read significantly larger files.
  • It reprojects the shapes as necessary to display them in JMARS. It handles most common projections, notably excepting Sinusoidal.
  • Saving shapes back to an existing .shp file that had an associated .prj file when it was loaded will project the vertices of each shape back to the original projection.
  • It supports real boolean values, null values, and is much faster than the old provider.
  • This provider does not have the numerous problems handling float/double values that the old provider has.
  • The old provider has been left intact for this release. Take the opportunity to try the new provider as soon as possible, but if you have any problems, let us know and use the old provider for the time being.
• KML reading now handles style maps, multigeometries, styles with missing color attributes, and files in the 2.2 schema.
• CSV shapes now support saving and loading color and line type columns, as well as line and polygon geometry.
• The column editor now validates the columns on every change, and won't let the user hit okay until problems are fixed. It checks for columns with duplicate name and type. For columns with an attached calculator, it ensures there are no impossible dependencies (columns dependent on themselves, columns with missing dependencies, columns with cyclic dependencies, etc.)
• Deleting a shape layer with unsaved data in it now warns the user before actually deleting the layer.
• The shape layer is now careful to read only as many shapefiles at one time as the system has CPUs to process.
• Greatly reduced the amount of memory consumed by the Undo stack.
• The Column Editor now displays fields for styles, even if they have not been used yet. Note that style fields that have even one value in them must be removed from the style editor and the column editor for the file(s) where that column has actual values.
• The shape layer status LED now changes to red when a calculated column is computing row values.
• Calculated fields are now computed off the user interface thread, so JMARS remains responsive while calculating field values.
• The Z Order menu did the opposite of what it should for the raise/lower actions.
• Numerous fixes to shape rendering, mouse intersection testing, status LED updates, handling of errors while loading shapes, and the undo feature.
• Shape scripts now support boolean cells properly, timestamps and dates are treated like strings, and conversion errors are logged to the console.
• Map sampling now returns null for those rows that do not intersect any valid data.
• Numerous fixes to the ESRI shapefile reader/writer.
• Fixed column editor issue where calculators could not be removed from a column except to replace the column with another calculator.
• Fixed incorrect polygon area calculation for polygons with duplicate vertices.
• Fixed incorrect alternate row shading of the background of checkboxes in the Feature table.
• Fixed reporting of errors during shape loading errors to describe the most specific cause instead of the first cause, which is often meaningless. We now group errors by file to make it easy to summarize what went wrong when loading many files at once.
• Fixed issue in the load/save file dialogs where filtering for files that end in a particular suffix (for example .shp) would show files with that suffix anywhere in the name (for example 'test.shp.xml'.)
• Fixed issue where the panner would be drawn twice after a style change.
• Fixed not seeing vertices when multiple polygons are selected, even though the vertices could be moved and deleted.
• Fixed using the default point size when dragging points, instead of the size used for normal rendering.

Map Layer

• Added new threshold operator to the map layer. Use it to cut away values below, at, or above a specific value.
• May now specify ignore values for color maps (like '255,255,0' to make yellow transparent) or to ignore based only on certain bands (like '255,-,-' to ignore pixels where the red component=255, and the other bands may have any value.)
• The custom map file upload dialog is now centered properly and the ESC key will close it.
• Fixed issues retrieving the list of maps on non-English Windows systems.
• Fixed issues with the custom map server rejecting longitude longitude values where the number for west > east.

Stamp Layer

• Queries to the server now avoid locking up the user interface wherever possible.
• Greatly improved the behavior when restoring saved sessions with stamp layers in them.

Scalebar Layer

• Now rounds distances to the nearest quarter, and has a new option to align the label left, right, or center.

Grid Layer

• Fixed null pointer exception when changing settings with the panner disabled.