maintenance

• ensures compatibility with libvpx-1.8.0 and higher: uses a forked libvpx-native-sys with an up-to-date bindgen version, forcefully regenerates libvpx bindings to match the system library
• freezes actix at version 0.7.9 (there are API-breaking compatibility problems with the newer version 0.8.0)

minor improvements

main changes:

• support for very large 2D images (i.e. 24900 x 26620): switched ispc internal addressing from 32 to 64 bits
• from_url(): displays percentage progress based on the downloaded amount of data for all FITS depths (previous behaviour: depth == 1: kB downloaded, depth > 1: no. of 2D frames downloaded)

v4.1.12

• improved streaming of spectral lines (no actix server overhead)

v4.1.11

• adds support for Suprime-Cam, AKARI, MOIRCS as well as FITS files from an external URL
• initial support for JAXA X-Ray image FITS files (full event files support will be added later on)
• improved support for optical data cubes
• for themes == bright fixes stylesheet modification problems (colour changes in the Welcome screen/display header pop-ups) in order to comply with Cross-Origin Resource Sharing (CORS) rules. As a consequence fitswebql.css is no longer being pulled from an external CDN network.

v4.1.10

• make hiding/showing the spectrum and molecular lines persistent between sessions (improved support for optical FITS data cubes)
• changed the icon for the 3D surface view (uses Material-Icons from Google)
• updated README (added a homebrew formula for rust)

improves responsiveness, removes eye candy

• reduce the CPU load during ZFP compression for discarded (no longer in use) datasets by switching from a parallel (OpenMP) to single-threaded ZFP execution policy; this should prevent "stealing" CPU threads from more important active user sessions
• remove the top header image from the fitswebql.html web page in the Personal Edition; this increases the amount of vertical space available for displaying the filesystem browser at the expense of "eye candy"; (deleting the browser cache may be needed to get the updated page)

maintenance

Rust code adjustments have been made to keep up the changes in the rusqlite package.

Existing users are encouraged to perform "cargo update" after "git pull" from within the fits_web_ql folder in order to update all the dependencies.

UI enhancements

• improved display for non-wide screens (i.e. 4:3 aspect ratio) (moved the image legend to the left etc.)
• improved support for AKARI (ELON/ELAT display)+changes to coords display (shows the lon/lat type next to the actual coords)
• added the option to change RA-only display format between HMS (hours) <->DMS (degrees)
• changed the location and text for the navigation menu hint ("☰SETTINGS" in the top/middle --> "☰" in the top-left corner)

P.S. Recently the main development efforts have shifted to a high-performance distributed C/C++ FITSWebQL SE ( https://github.com/jvo203/FITSWebQL ), where "SE" stands for Supercomputer Edition. This is a testing ground for FITS data compression schemes, virtual FITS files distributed across multiple machines etc.

ZFP compression

This version enables ZFP compression (https://github.com/LLNL/zfp) of bitpix == -32 data cubes via a new feature "zfp", in order to speed-up second-time loading of FITS files.

For details please scroll to the end of README.

v4.1.5

• made the FITS file directory handler asynchronous (non-blocking)
• added a new command-line option to specify the home directory with FITS files (see the end of README)