February 25, 2008

OpenViz 2.8 Release

As part of Advanced Visual Systems' ongoing program of improving and supporting the OpenViz product line, we are pleased to announce the availability of the OpenViz 2.8 release. We appreciate your business, and this release reflects our continued commitment to your success.

OpenViz 2.8 ® is being released with many product features, nearly all of which have been requested by users such as yourself. Your suggestions for product improvements drive our development efforts, and we believe you will benefit from this new release.

New Product Features

New features in OpenViz Particles 2.8 are listed below.

1. Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) Support
2. White Space Refinement - Viewport and Axes Components
3. Update of JOGL to JSR231 Release 1.1.1-rc4
4. Support of OpenGL in Swing-based Applications
5. Gradients
6. Geometric Clipping
7. Dials
8. Axis / Legend Imagemap updates
9. Alpha Channel Support (Transparency in Output PNG)
10. Improved Legend Entry Fitting
11. New Nested Layout Techniques
12. New Radial Labeled Pie Chart (replacing existing PieChart), Side Labeled Pie Chart
13. New JavaDoc Support

Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) Support

OpenViz Particles now supports Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) in both versions of Visual Studio 2008 Beta 1 and Beta 2. Example applications specific to your development environment can be requested through AVS Support. When Visual Studio 2008 is officially released, an example application will be included in an updated release.

White Space Refinement - Viewport and Axes Components

OpenViz Particles Viewports and Axes components have been updated to allow for less white space when rendering. This allows for finite white space control, especially useful when outputting images to be embeded in PDFs, web layout, and other presentation material. When updating existing applications, you may notice less white space. To adjust and increase white space allocation, please use the existing ViewportInsets to adjust spacing.

Update of JOGL to JSR231 Release 1.1.1-rc4

OpenViz Particles now supports the latest Java for OpenGL (JOGL) release. This update allows Particles to benefit from the latest OpenGL compatibility and deployment scenarios offered by JOGL.

Platforms supported by OpenViz Particles with JOGL:

• Windows i586
• Linux i586 & AMD64
• Mac OS X Universal
• Solaris SPARC

Support of OpenGL in Swing-based Applications

OpenViz Particles can now use OpenGL renderering in Swing based applications. Previously light weight components in Java would not support a heavyweight component such as OpenGL, however, with the updated JOGL revision and the latest Java compilers (Java 1.6+) you may now update or implement OpenGL rendering for full hardware support of your graphics card.

Gradients

OpenViz Particles charting now supports gradients and texture maps on the following components: BarChart, PieChart, LineAreaChart, GanttChart, DiscreteLegend, and Glyphs. A new interface (I)VzSurfaceFaceAttributeSceneNode allows the application developer to apply various look and feel properties to achieve the desired presentation.

Geometric Clipping

All of the containers Viewport2D, Viewport3D and Workbox have implemented a ClippingEnabled property. By default this property is now set to false, to ensure consistent behaviour with previous releases of OpenViz Particles. Note: Clipping continues to work even if the container is being managed by another parent container. There are two scene node attributes, both inheritable, which affect how geometry is treated by the clipping planes: ExcludeFromClipping and ExcludeFromSceneExtents.

Dials

Dials are typically used as a quick visual representation of a single metric and value. The DialManipulator component additionally allows for multiple metrics and values to be displayed within a single dial through multiple sectors, axes, and needles. The component allows you to place a dial into your visualization and connect it to your data with a variety of look and feel styles leveraging the OpenViz engine.

Axis / Legend Imagemap Updates

Image map template support has been added to all labels produced by the axes and discrete legend components. For the axis this includes the text, unit and the labels. For the discrete legend this includes item and title labels. For all, the only keyword that is supported is 'Value'. This will result in an image map string with the actual text string of the label being substituted for template keyword 'Value'. The image maps generated by axes and discrete legends can be used in the same way as other charting components, for example to provide pop ups on an html page.

Alpha Channel Support (Transparency in Output image)

On the Java side, the GetImage method has been updated to support the output of transparency when using the AWT renderer.

Improved Legend Entry Fitting

A new property has been added "TrimToFit". If set to true the DiscreteLegend will truncate the number of entries to fit the given viewport. A second property, ShowEllipsis, shows "..." if not all the entries where displayed.

New Nested Layout Techniques

The new Interim (I)VzFieldContainer component allows the developer to position a chart within a chart. Supporting both COM/.NET and Java platforms, the Field Container component allows for the ultimate in nested layout management. You can easily take an existing layout provided by another chart, and position nested charts to create the new visualization. Recommended for use with hierarchical tree layouts and network layouts, the Field Container component makes integration easy.

New Radial Labeled Pie Chart (replacing existing PieChart), Side Labeled Pie Chart

Two new Pie Chart components have been added to OpenViz Particles: The (I)VzRadialLabelledPieChart and the (I)VzSideLabelledPieChart.

The RadialLabelledPieChart component replaces the deprecated PieChart component. This new component contains the same functionality as the deprecated one with some performance updates in addition to the gradient and texture map support.

The SideLabelledPieChart component contains a new label layout algoritmn that places the labels on either side of the chart in two columns. The API allows one to control the various look and feel properties of the leader lines and label positions to achieve the desired presentation. Some examples are shown below.

New JavaDoc Support

OpenViz Particles now includes a .ZIP file containing the Overview and API section in JavaDoc. Just point your Java IDE to the .ZIP and enjoy context sensitive help while you develop.

The AVS home page on the World Wide Web is constantly being updated, and contains the latest information on product development. New product information, technical white papers, product licensing forms, etc. are posted on our Web site. Please visit our site periodically to get the most recent technical notes, descriptions of known problems and workarounds, and late breaking product news.

If you have any questions or issues concerning AVS products, you can contact us through your local AVS sales office, or through our homepage. Thank you for your interest and your continued support of Advanced Visual Systems.

Sincerely,

The OpenViz Product Team