My Community
General Category => Announcements => Topic started by: Ron D. on December 02, 2016, 01:37:10 PM
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Hi All,
I just wanted to give a preview of the main features that will be included in release 14 of Sliver, which introduces significant features. It is in the final stages of testing and performance tweaking and will be released around January 1, but since I've found the new features to be very useful I wanted to let you know to check back for this release!
- Horizontal compression and expansion of groups of axes to spread out axes of interest while retaining all the data. This has been very helpful when inputting data of many variables.
- K-means clustering and automatic brushing of the clusters, with a user-selectable number of clusters k and the number of those clusters to rainbow color brush (requires installation of the free R statistical software). Viewing the Transparent PC Plot Window after this function, which is automatic, provides immediate feedback on how well the values for k and the number of brushes worked, providing an iterative process for optimizing the clusters.
- Export and automatic display of 3D plots in Matlab if installed to take advantage of its excellent interactive 3D plotting capabilities for data color-brushed in Sliver.
- An option to display histograms and means along the axes, with a user-selectable number of histogram bins. I've found this extremely useful to help interpret overplotted data in concert with range brushing and plotting with transparency.
- An option to center user-selectable axes on their means or on a selected line to show variations from a reference. This dovetails nicely with a new feature to thicken any selected lines in the PC Plot for easier viewing, where thickened lines when exported to PDF are drawn on top without transparency with a thickness specified in a new option in the PostScript/PDF Export Settings. To highlight specific lines in the PDF file previously required manually editing the intermediate PostScript file.
- An option to manually enter the range for one or more axes. Having common ranges sometimes helps when comparing variables of the same type (race split times, etc.). This previously required a manual process of adding rows to the data.
- A Google Earth Path Plot option to not connect a path between points lying farther apart than a user-selected distance. This prevents straight-line paths from being drawn between segments widely separated due to hidden brushes, which really helps when creating multiple KML files representing different layers of data. It is also useful for plotting discrete points with colored supports for data that doesn't represent a path but rather discrete geographic locations.
- An update of the Count-Based Animation window to make the entries more intuitive. Also, including a Google Earth Path Plot in the animation no longer requires that the plot be created in the current session, and the optional line to a secondary set of coordinates can now be rainbow-colored according to yet another variable. Finally, the DataPlayer controls window is more intuitive, allows user-specified ranges on the row rate, and provides options for looping.
- An option to select all unbrushed lines, which is helpful when brushing uninteresting lines and then hiding that brush.
- There are no longer restrictions on certain functions that could not be performed after a Ctrl-Scroll zoom had occurred.
I will announce the release of Sliver 1.4 here soon.
Ron