News

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Revision as of 10:28, 14 April 2009

Thursday 2 April 2009

We have a first trial version of vips-7.18. It passes all the tests and works with all my stuff here, so I hope it's OK. We now need testers, so if you have time, could you download and build? I'll make a win32 binary early next week. If things go OK we'll announce the new version to the world in another 10 days or so.

For building, the big differences over 7.16 are:

now uses the "matio" package, if available, to read Matlab save files
no longer needs SWIG to build, since we package the generated files in the tarball
nip2 now insists on flex and bison (it used to tolerate yacc and lex)

So that's one dependency more and one dropped.

We have a What's New in 7.18 page with details, but the big ones are:

new interpolation system (you can finally do bicubic, yay), this is a really important basic improvement we've been waiting years for
new file formats: Radiance and Matlab
nip2 should feel faster and more responsive

29 December 2008

Here's a new stable version, 7.16.4. There are changes to help ubuntu 8.10 and fedora 11, plus some doc fixes and one tiny bug fix, but that's it.

19 November 2008

We've just added a fancy new interpolation system to the development version of vips. Previously, each operation had it's own interpolator wired in. Now, there's a way of writing a generic interpolator that any operation can use, and a set of fast, high-quality interpolators to choose between.

We have some Interpolation_samples a short explanation. To try it out, build from SVN trunk. You'll see some new options in the nip2 image transform operations.

13 October 2008

There's yet another new stable version, 7.16.3. This fixes the cancel problem that David Joyner found last week. I really hope this is the final 7.16 for a while :-( I've merged the 7.16 cleanups back into trunk, and we now have 7.17.0, the next development version. My plans for this next version are:

I have a project with Nicolas Robidoux to add his YAFR resampler to vips. This is a fast, high quality bicubic interpolator. We should all get better quality image resizing and rotation.
I have a project with Jesper Friis to improve the vips type system. The plan is to add compound types (eg. "array of x") to vips, so that plugins can pass much more complex objects to nip2 and back. We plan to use this feature to add vector overlays to images.
plus some minor stuff

If anyone has more ideas, do chip in.

Monday 6 October 2008

That took a while, but we now have a 7.16.2 announced on Freshmeat and friends. See What's New in 7.16 for a summary of the new stuff. The supported download area has sources plus a windows binary.

Wednesday 10 September 2008

A first release of 7.16 is out. The website is being updated, if no one reports a problem before Monday, we'll announce to the world.

Thursday 17 July 2008

Yet another supported update: 7.14.5.

Changes:

better ImageMagick detection makes FreeBSD builds work (thanks Adam)
option to disable desktop updates (thanks Adam)
bug fix in nip2 helps matrix operations

Thursday 5 June 2008

There's a new stable version up, 7.14.4. This fixes a couple of crash bugs, a couple of minor bugs, and adds a few small features.

The big news is an all-new Windows build system. We are now cross-compiling from Linux to Windows and everything is working much more smoothly. It's much easier to update now, so we have been able to switch to a more recent gtk library stack. nip2 ought to feel noticably snappier.

We also finally have a working libvips.dll, so Windows programmers can easily use vips from their own code. There's a win32dev in the download area containing zips of all the files you need, plus some scripts to help build them. Check the readme.

There's some news on the development version too. We have a branch with pluggable image loaders, so you can easily add new image formats to VIPS and have them appear in all the interfaces. Plus there are improvements to the Python API to make it much easier to move images between VIPS and other image processing libraries.

Wednesday 26 March 2008

vips-7.14 is now final and supported and development have swapped. We'll post an announcement on Freshmeat etc.

There are a couple of new pages on the website:

What's New in 7.14: Quickly lists the major new things in this version.
How it works: Is a technical introduction to the insides of vips.

Monday 3 March, 2008

vips-7.14 is launched! We have a new supported download area with the stuff in. Source only for now, builds and packages coming in the next few days.

Friday 25 January, 2008

Princeton have launched version 1.0 of the PARSEC benchmark suite. This is a set of sample programs for testing parallel computer architectures. One of the sample programs is based on vips, which is very gratifying.

Thursday 24 January, 2008

7.13.3. New stuff:

left-hand-side pattern matching in nip
left-hand-side pattern matching in list comprehensions
the python interface is broken :( it should be unbroken soon
new operators from Tom
bug fixes, memleaks, cleanups

This will hopefully be the last 7.13 before 7.14.0 at the end of Feb.

Friday 23 November, 2007

Another development snapshop, 7.13.2. New stuff:

background write for JPEG, TIFF, PNG, PPM gives a small speedup
revised and much better progress system
list comprehensions nest correctly
small stuff

Wednesday 31 October 2007

Another new development snapshot, 7.13.1. Notable new features:

integrated GREYCstoration filter
more visible arrow view
left pane lets you write defs which are local to a workspace, and panes work more smoothly
much better batch mode, try "nip2 --set"
you can type "fred = 12" into nip and get a button called "fred"
some parts of libvips are now C++, eek

Monday 8 October 2007

I've updated the GREYCstoration plugin. The new version is much faster, uses less memory, works for images with any number of channels and does 8-bit, 16-bit, and float pixels.

Friday 21 September 2007

Another bugfix release, 7.12.5.

better formula widget finally switches view correctly
min and max were broken for non-rectangular matricies
recomb was broken for >3 band images (thanks Kirk)
support for 32 and 64-bit ImageMagick (thanks Marcel)
better 8-bit ImageMagick support
better arg handling for Python (thanks Simon)
better libsrcCC linking (thanks Pablo)
cleanups and minor fixings

We have our first development release as well: 7.13.0! Not much there yet, but nip2 does now have lambdas and list comprehensions, which is pretty cool.

Monday 30 July 2007

Another bugfix release, 7.12.4. There was a problem in some of nip's class libraries which broke the image mosaicing menu items (among others).

Friday 27 July

Another bugfix release, 7.12.3, and we're now ready to tell the world. Sourceforge/Freshmeat etc. are being updated.

Friday 20 July 2007

We've finally made 7.12 official. The website is being updated now, and we have a proper 7.12 download page. Woo us!

Also, the source is now in SVN.

Monday 16 July 2007

It took an age, but we finally have working exceptions in Python! There's a 7.12.1 in the vips-7.11 download area. There are some minor additions and a lot of bugfixes, thanks for the reports.

If this works OK, we'll make 7.12 official next week.

Monday 30 April 2007

There's a first test release of 7.12 in the vips-7.11 download area. The only remaining (known) issue is with exception handling in the Python binding.

If there aren't too many complaints we'll make an official 7.12 in a week or so's time.

Friday 13 April 2007

Google will be paying Mohammad Shahiduzzaman to spend the summer hacking on VIPS and panotools. He'll be adding some new interpolation modes (at least bicubic and sinc, hopefully) and a new resampler. This new code will then be used to switch chunks of panotools/hugin (a panorama suite) to use VIPS for their image rendering.

There were over 6,000 applications and only 900 grants given out, so I think we've done well to get it (and congratulations to Mohammad). Hopefully this will raise VIPS's profile and we'll get some nice new features as well.

nip2's new plot widget is coming along: it's now what the CVS version uses to display all charts. We have a Screenshot.

There's a new "don't lock children on top" preference for Rachel too.

Wednesday 7 March 2007

New development snapshots: vips-7.11.20 and nip2-7.11.17.

Another new implementation of the buffer cache now runs with no locks at all, helping SMP scalability a lot. There's also a new buffer recycling system which avoids a lot of malloc/free pairs. With 64 CPUs we now get a steady 40x speedup.
nip2 has an integrated charting widget (still in testing): we have a screenshot. Try out the Plot menu if you're curious.
nip2 columns snap together, and there's a right-button menu on the workspace background.
The VIPS C++ API now wraps IMAGEVEC and friends with std::vector<VImage>, so you can call the vector operations. This works in the Python interface too.
Various other bugfixes and small improvements.

Friday 2 February 2007

First Core 2 Duo Benchmarks!

Thursday 25 January 2007

New development snapshots: vips-7.11.19 and nip2-7.11.16. A new history system reduces RAM use a lot on big workspaces and the vips manual has been updated for the upcoming 7.12 release. Several big bug fixes too.

Old news

We have pages for previous years: News (2006), News (2005), News (2004), News (2003), News (ancient).

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