ActiveGEM v1.4.1 Released

Version 1.4.1 of the ActiveGEM package was released on 2 March, 2004, and contains several important upgrades over the previous publicly-released package (v1.4.0). Of most interest is the implementation of a memory management system in the plotGEM interface, which allows users much more flexibility in 'superposition' and 'overlay' modes and allows them to move back and forth through layers without losing overlying information. As well, several bugs have been identified and fixed, including colour mapping problems for 'orange-red' and 'violet' and device resets for 'multi-time' selections.

Activation of the 'memory manager' (under the Options menu of plotGEM) gives the user the capability to re-add layers that have been previously removed during the session. For example, if a user working on the third superposed layer of a plan plot suddenly realizes that he/she has forgotten to add the colour bar for the first layer, then he/she can simply withdraw the latest two layers, modify the colour bar properties, then activate the 'memory manager' and hit the 'submit' button twice in order to move back to the third layer - the attributes of the second and third layers are unchanged from their previous values in this case. Without the memory manager, the attributes of the underlying layer are propagated upwards (i.e. there are no changes in the options as layers are added); this can be very irritating if you need to make small changes to already-submitted layers. Having the memory manager active at all times, however, is also potentially undesirable since the attributes newly-generated layer are initialized to default values rather than to the previously-specified ones. For this reason, the developers suggest using the memory manager only for the re-addition of previously-withdrawn layers.

Other new functionality includes the implementation of enchanced titling selection. The user now has the choice (in the Options->Plot Titles window) of displaying in 'no title', 'one title', or 'multi-title' modes. In 'one title' mode, the attribues of the title are sticky and therefore propagated to any added / modified layer. Although any previously-defined titles will appear in the Override string (for possible later modification by the user) their colour is set to 'transparent' so that they are hidden at plot-time.

The developers hope that ActiveGEM v1.4.1 will be of use for the research community; as always, please contact us with any suggestions for product enhancements of with any bug reports that you encounter as you use the package.