ParaView 3.14 Released
Kitware and the ParaView team are pleased to announce the release of ParaView 3.14. This release features usability enhancements, improvements to the Plugin framework, new panels, and more than 100 other resolved issues, which can be found in the change log. In tandem with the 3.14 announcement is the release of the new ParaView 3.14 Users’ Guide eBook, available through Kitware’s online store.
ParaView 3.14 features a redesigned Find Data dialog and Color Editor. The updated Find Data dialog makes it possible to use complex queries to select elements, including combining multiple test cases with Boolean operations. The Color Editor, used to edit lookup tables or color tables for scalar mapping, now enables independent editing of the color and opacity functions.
ParaView’s charting capabilities have been extended with a new scatter plot matrix view and the ability to visualize multiple dimensions of data in one compact form. This improved view enables users to more easily discern patterns in small scatterplots and change the focus of the plots.
With this release, netcdf4 has been updated to 4.1.2, and ParaView can now handle large netcdf files that rely on hdf5 data storage.
There are several usability enhancements in ParaView 3.14. To simplify the process of working with many views simultaneously, ParaView now supports creating multiple tabs for placing views, which enables rapid switching of views laid out on a tile-display by simply switching the active tab. The view layout framework has also been improved, and now allows users to change the layout of views using Python. Other usability improvements include the ability to easily copy values such as ranges, bounds, etc. from the information tab, statics inspector, and spreadsheet view, to the clipboard; a new search feature using Ctrl+F to find items in variables, lists and trees within the selected widget; and dockable inspector panels such as the information or properties tab.
To improve memory management on clusters, there is a new Memory Inspector panel. This panel makes it easier for users running on large clusters to identify and debug memory-related issues by providing a mechanism to track the memory used on all the nodes.
In the 3.14 release, the Plugin framework has been extended to enable developers to provide documentation for their plugins, which shows up in the default application help window accessible
from the Tools menu.
This release also includes two new experimental features, collaboration and multi-servers support. With collaborative support, users will be able to connect multiple clients to the same server (pvserver) for collaborative visualization. Support for multi-servers enables the ParaView client to connect to multiple remote servers at the same time to build separate pipelines on the connected servers using the same client. These are both experimental features and should be considered as ‘alpha’.
The new binaries are available on the ParaView download page, and the updated online documentation is available on the wiki. As always, we rely on your feedback to make ParaView better. We encourage you to leave feedback and vote for new features, and get involved with the community through the mailing list.