Today we tagged the next alpha release. As many of you know, there were no
official public announcments, news and releases. But the development was not
dead all this time, though not as fast as planned at the beginning…

Please have a look at the recent changes in the commit browser.
https://sourceforge.net/p/labplot/code/commit_browser

The basic workflow – importing ascii data to a spreadsheet und creating a
worksheet with one or several plots – is quite usable now.
A lot of plot properties can be easily modified via the according dock
widgets.

There are couple of issues (instabilities or missing functionality) which
we’re already aware of. Some of them are tracked in our ticket system, some
not. The most annoying/evident are:
1. Sporadic crashes when adding a new cartesian plot to the worksheet.
2. Wrong scaling of the axis labels when exporting to pdf/eps.
3. We have undo-functions for almost everything you can see on the worksheet
and on the spreadsheet. Though you can undo a lot of things,
currently the GUI is not notified about the undo-step and you see the old
value. You do see the new value if you reload the dock widget (switch to
another dock widget and then back)
4. We go out of memory at the moment, if we try to load big data. This is
basically because of the many undo-stuff we instantiate here. This part should
be redesigned. With a very small fix (no undo-stuff) I can manage to load
bigger data (tested with 200k lines of ascii-data from kst-project). But the
initial painting of all points in the plot obviously lags. So, here we should
pay more attention too.

Until the next release, the first beta release, following things are planned
to be implemented:
1. Legend for the cartesian plot
2. Notify the UI about the undo-steps.
3. Better “hover” and “selected” effects for the worksheet objects.
3. ASCII-import of big(er) data – here basically decide, how to effectively
implement the undo/redo for such a big import.
4. Bug fixing.

Please grab the alpha3-tarball or, even better, checkout the repository so you
can stay up-to-date with the current development more easily 🙂
Any comments and suggestions are highly welcome!