Aabel™ 2 Maintenance Updates

November 1, 2008: Aabel™ 2.4.3

Maintenance: The main fixes and optimizations in this update are outlined below:

• A fix for a bug introduced in the previous update of Aabel, which causes linear regression lines to be drawn as straight lines when using log or log-log axis scale.
• While drawing the error bars, location is now given higher priority than line thickness under the pdf imaging model; this will prevent misalignment of the error bar centers relative to marker symbols.
• Opening of database metaphors has been optimized; Aabel no longer issues messages regarding interfile activities.
• A fix for a bug in restoring the original magnification and offsets while opening a graphic viewer file.
• Worksheet files are now immediately compacted after import of large irregular data to prevent unnecessary large file sizes; cartographic coordinates transformation of large shape files no longer leads to unnecessary oversized worksheet files.
• A fix for a bug that was triggered when rapidly opening and closing a textbox.
• User defined axis settings for 3-D charts are now evaluated with a more liberal algorithm; giving the user larger flexibility in range and step settings relative to the range of the actual data.
• A fix for a bug that caused overlapping of auto-generated tables (from statistical analysis output) under conditions where the table width exceeded the width of viewer pages.
• The current fixes also include workarounds for System bugs up to 10.5.5.

January 8, 2008: Aabel™ 2.4.2 Update

New:

• A feature that allows recoding non-UTF-8/non-ASCII text to UTF-8 during import and which includes all System-supported text encodings (typically around 100); the feature is added to shape file- and delimited-importers.

Maintenance:

• This update includes a fix for a Quartz bug triggered in paired line charts with error bars, addresses issues in keyboard short-cuts for some menu items under Leopard, and has fixes for bugs and glitches discovered during stress testing of the application.
• The alias manager response time (which is a System-performance issue) can occasionally interfere with launching an application. To get around this problem, if the alias manager does not respond within a reasonable time, Aabel will start without a further request for resolving aliases to recent files. Should this happen, the "Open Recent" menu will not list the files whose aliases were not resolved.
• A 10.4.4.x System bug that affects the interrelationship between the System character palette and Aabel worksheet editor has been fixed in the latest version of Leopard. Hence, the workaround we provided earlier as a solution has become a problem when running the application under Leopard. Using this update, Aabel applies the related workaround when launched under 10.4.4.x while deactivating it under Leopard.

November 14, 2007: Aabel™ 2.4 and Aabel Stats SDK 1.0

New Leopard Ready: OS-related enhancements under Leopard include increased speed of Quartz drawing, faster and smoother worksheet window operations Supporting Statistics Plugin Modules: Aabel stats plugin SDK v1.0 is now released; this allows users to write their own statistical methods/use Open Source code while using the services and technology that Aabel provides through the API Aabel 2.4 is the first plugin-enabled version of the application. For SDK information, click here.

August 2, 2007: Aabel™ 2.3 Update

New:

• Choice of user-defined multipliers for scientific notation to allow varying formats accepted by different scientific journals
• Major enhancements to existing features with emphasize on improving worksheet operations and fixing glitches in window-related operations
• A global option for modifying the color of worksheet grid lines
• An added area chart type where both X and Y are value axes (in commonly used area charts, one axis is categorical, i.e., the values are treated as a sequence of data categories)
• Added features to pie charts (true 3-D, removing outline of slices in 2-D pie, etc.)
• Allowing conversion of a textual variable with unambiguous date data without separator (e.g., yyyymmdd) to a variable of type date (with any of the built-in formats or a custom-defined format)

Maintenance:

• Fix for a bug in the double-Y line chart when Y2 having a log scale
• Fix for an Intel bug triggered when importing values from formula-cells in Excel
• Fix for a crash bug triggered when a viewer had lost contact with a data file to which it has been referencing along a very long path name
• Fix for a bug triggered when the error bars extended into values that are undefined on a log scale
• Fix for bugs that were rarely triggered during stress testing of the application
• Workaround for a System bug concerning resizing and zooming of windows when using more than one screen
• Workaround for a System bug related to coordinate systems & resolution in the OpenGL Intel implementation

April 15, 2007: Aabel™ 2.2 Update

New:

Map Analysis:

• Polynomial trend surface analysis of XYZ data
• Polynomial trend surface analysis of matrix data
• Matrix cellwise operations
• The map analysis output includes new matrices and/or XYZ estimates of trend and residuals, as well as an ANOVA report for significance of regression of Kth order polynomial trend surface.

  Added Map Projections:

• Hammer projection (added to already existing 18 projection systems)
• State plane coordinates (US) supporting all 134 zones, NAD127 and NAD83

  Other New Features:

• Displaying real world coordinates of cursor position on X-Y charts, so that data can be read as you drag over a graph
• Copying real world coordinates of a drawing positioned over an X-Y chart
• Allowing the use of log scale in column/clustered column and bar/clustered bar charts, without breaking the viewer backward compatibility (i.e., by adding a separate plot type that also permits changing the datum position)

General Enhancements

• Modification of the row-wise calculation syntax (in the worksheet formula editor and data manipulator) to permit any number of variables to be included in such calculations
• An added feature to the Kaplan-Meier logrank significance test, allowing the choice of either pair-wise comparisons or comparing pairs while taking into account all groups
• Enhancement in the way that moving average is used in matrix contour, minimizing artifacts at the boundaries
• An added option to allow flipping an axis direction in a contour matrix diagram
• An added option in clustered univariate charts (i.e., box & whisker, box percentile, the diamond mean comparison plot, bar and line plots of mean, median, min., and max.), which allows removing the grid lines separating groups belonging to different variables
• An added option to pie charts to allow removing the outline of the pie slices

Maintenance

• Fix for encoding and conversion errors (e.g., use of Japanese variable names in formula editor; long file names with German characters in database metaphor, etc.)
• Fix for glitches in axis synchronization and synchronization between sorting and object labels in scatter series plots with a category axis
• Fix for a bug that was triggered when using dates as categories in a univariate chart
• Fix for a bug that was triggered when using log scale in a bubble chart
• Fix for glitches in resizing worksheet columns

November 9, 2006: Aabel™ 2.1 Update

New:

• Support for drag & drop from Aabel into applications that support the operation (e.g., Keynote, Word, PowerPoint, Photoshop, etc.)
• Support for drag & drop from other applications (e.g., LaTeX Equation Editor, graphic files from Finder, etc.) into Aabel
• Enhancement of UI for use of diverse export formats (PDF, PICT vector graphics, PNG, BMP, JPEG, TIFF, bitmap PICT, SGI, TGA, etc.)
• Added flexibility in 3-D and 4-D scatter charts, to allow graphic clipping without a need to exclude data from the visualization pipeline
• Added Partial regression ANOVA to multiple regression for testing the significance of individual predictor variables
• Major overhaul to Kaplan-Meier survival analysis implementation, to allow using unstructured raw data An additional method for pivoting and summarizing raw survival data outside the context of a survival analysis
• Six varieties of new 3-D Quartz prism charts Added flexibility for making templates from contour diagrams
• Aabel 3-D charts have been drawn and rotated using OpenGL for speed and real-time interactivity. This update provides the additional option of using Quartz quality graphics in 3-D column, pyramid, area, and band charts for presentation purposes, while retaining the rotation speed using OpenGL.

Maintenance:

• Fix for a bug interfering with conversion of the 1.5.8 viewer files
• FIX for a bug triggered during the export of a thematic group using a thematic map, an X-Y chart, and an X-Y-Z contour (causing a shift in the position of the contour chart relative to borders of the thematic master)
• Fix for a bug that resulted in misplacement of regression equations (hot-linked to variables) during export
• Fix for a print/export problem triggered in double-Y/double-X charts displaying two independent regressions applied to X1-Y1 and X2-Y2
• Fix for a crash bug in number formatting in Intel: the bug is triggered while attempting to generate a bar/line plot of mean from variables having a single data entry
• Fix for an Intel issue with importing custom-design date formats
• A workaround for a System bug that affects the interrelationship between the System character palette and Aabel worksheet editor
• Fix for a damaged menu resource, a problem affecting the superscript/subscript preference settings
• Fix for an axis synchronization issue in matrix scatter chart