Re: qwtplot3d versions

[Micha B. <kri...@us...>]

Monday, April 18, 2005, 19:04:22, Stefan Gerlach wrote:

> Hi,

> I'm a little bit confused with the versions of qwtplot3d.
> The website http://qwtplot3d.sourceforge.net/ says that version 0.2.4 (11 June
> 2004) is the latest ("Next release planned : 01/2005") and the mailing list
> states that "qwt3d 0.3.0 beta comes out in January '05." .The website seems a
> little bit outdated here.
> Did you plan to release a stable version of 0.2.4 or just continue with the
> next beta version (0.3.0)?
> I'm using qwtplot3d a lot in LabPlot and like to improve some things. I may
> send some bug reports or wishes if desired.

> Thanks so far.

> best wishes,
> Stefan Gerlach

Your confusion is completely satisfied. I planned a release in January
'05 and I made this public - a thing you should never do premature :-)
In fact 0.2.4. beta is the current release. The next one will be 0.3.0.

The release date depends on
1) Qt4 release
2) free time slots for implementing some of the gathered feature
requests and my own wishes.

Beside your bad experience with my last promise - I can say more or less
definitely, what will come in the new version. I mentioned Qt4, so
compatibility at least for the core library is an issue - the examples
step by step, depending on what porting tools Trolltech will deliver.

Next important is a new data model. Talking about the API it will
manifest itself in even more general loadFromData versions. If you are
common with cell complexes in a mathematician's sense, this will be the
final underlying data structure. It includes all the yet provided
variants + graphs (node+edges) + nodes+edges+faces and finally - not yet
in the upcoming version - nodes+edges+faces+voxels are in my mind. A
nice property here is, that this model supports also disconnected data
sets, so e.g plots with more than one surfaces (multiplots) are
automatically included.
All this will also result in new specialized widget classes (the current
one in the works is a graph plot)

3th thing is more interactivity, that means the possibility to implement
more specific mouse handling (element based). To make it good (quick but
also flexible enough) it has been turned out to be no small design
challenge.

The last issue are some other movement modii (arcball etc.). But this
will very probably not yet come with the next version.

Hope this can clarify things a bit. Regarding your friendly offered bug
reports - I'm always interested in these things, also feature requests
etc., so don't hesitate to contact me.

Micha  
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