[itom-discussions] New itom 4.2.0 released

[Hahn, R. <rob...@it...>]

The 'itom' team is pleased to announce the next version 4.2.0 of 'itom'.
More than 1000 commits have been
pushed into the open source Git repositories since the last version 4.1.0

The most important changes are:

* The C++ and Python class itom.dataObject has now two new data types datetime and timedelta. Both have an accuracy of microseconds.
* Complete redesigned variable detail dialog for items in the workspace widgets, especially for variables of type itom.dataObject and numpy.ndarray. In this case a table preview is shown for the array, including some basic information, meta information etc. A heatmap can be shown using background colors in the table, values can be exported and it is possible to display 1D or 2D plots from selected ranges, columns or rows in the displayed table.
* Algorithms in algorithm plugins can now not only be called by the method itom.filter() but also by the wrapper module itom.algorithms().
* drag&drop of algorithm into script or console will now paste the new algorithms.myAlgo(...) formalism instead of filter("myAlgo", args).
* Complete rework of the demo script sections in the user documentation. A gallery shows an introduction to several demo scripts.
* QPropertyEditorWidget can now be filtered, sorted and grouped. This feature is enabled in the corresponding dock widget of the plots.
* New plugins: ThorlabsTCubeTec, QuantumComposer, ThoralbsKCubeDCServo and HBMSpider8.
* New designerplugins: plotly and twipoglfigure.

For more information or other new features see the changelog:
https://itom.bitbucket.io/latest/docs/00_releaseNotes/changelog_v4x.html

The Windows setup is now compiled with the following C++ components:

* compiled with Qt 5.12.6
* contains OpenCV 4.2.0
* PointCloudLibrary 1.10.0, visualization using VTK 8.2.0

The all-in-one installer is now shipped with the following Python packages:

* Python 3.8.10
* NumPy 1.23.1
* Jedi 0.18.1
* SciPy 1.8.1
* Matplotlib 3.5.2
* Scikit-image 0.19.3
* Scikit-learn 1.1.1
* OpenCV-Python 4.6.0.66
* Pandas 1.4.3
* Plotly 5.9.0
* Openpyyxl 3.0.10
* Tables 3.7.0
* Python package Seaborn 0.11.2
* further dependencies

The new version of itom is also available as portable version, which can be executed without installation.
It might be possible, that Microsoft Redistributable 2017 must be present on the used computer.
It is not recommended to place the portable version under the directory C:/Program Files

Itom 4.2.0 can be used in parallel with older versions.
When installing itom 4.2.0, older versions are not uninstalled automatically, so this must be done manually if desired.
Also the portable version can be used parallel to already installed versions of itom.

This version is tagged with 'v4.2.0' in the source repository, the
current setup versions for Windows 64bit are available at
https://bitbucket.org/itom/itom/downloads/.

A changelog with the most important changes and added features is
available in the current documentation:
https://itom.bitbucket.io/latest/docs/00_releaseNotes/changelog_v4x.html

The main project website is:
https://itom.bitbucket.io/

If you have any questions, issues or itom related topics, write an email
to this mailing list (itom-discussions@...)
or report bugs at https://bitbucket.org/itom/itom/issues. If you want to
get further information, like release notes...)
please subscript to the mailing list at
https://sourceforge.net/p/itom/mailman/.

Best regards,
the entire itom-team

Institut für Technische Optik, University of Stuttgart