Important Changes for Release 1.6

SAOtng is an evolving (some would say oscillating) system: we try to respond to user needs as well as possible. The following changes have been initiated by user feedback:

Flipping the image

In 1.5, the default was to flip each image as it was loaded. This was most annoying for many people, especially for IRAF users who were seeing their images flipped flipped by the IRAF tv/display task and then again by SAOtng. We tried various options and finally decided to turn off default flipping. If you wish always to have your images flipped, use the -flip [x|y|xy] switch or set the SAOtng SAOTNG_FLIPenvironment variable to x or y or xy.

Another change regarding flipping is that the default value for flipping does not affect loading IRAF images from tv/display. Thus, if you use -flip y on the command line and then load an image from IRAF, the image is not flipped by SAOtng. However, if the frame has already been flipped (either explicitly using a menu or by loading an image externally), subsequent display of images from IRAF images will be flipped in that frame.

Colors

An ugly word in SAOtng circles ... its becoming more and more apparent that colors are the big resource problem of the 90's. Programs such as Netscape hog the colormap and cause SAOtng to "flash" when the mouse is moved in and out. Worse, the CDE window manager itself hogs so many colors that it makes SAOtng flash terribly.

We have tried to deal with this problem by making the SAOtng colors match the current Netscape grey and more grey color scheme; at least SAOtng should not flash terribly when Netscape is running.

As a last resort, there is a sub-menu option in the Colors menu that allows you, as a last resort, to make the SAOtng black and white. If you know that you need to run a black and white GUI from the start, then use the

	-drab

switch. (Drabness can be turned on permanently by setting the SAOTNG_GUIFLAVOR environment variable to DRAB.)

For those without color problems, we offer the switch:

	-b or -beautiful

which gives SAOtng a pastel color scheme ... very comforting in this chaotic age. This can be turned on permanently by setting the SAOTNG_GUIFLAVOR environment variable to BEAUTIFUL.

Tiling Frames

Release 1.5 supported a very kludgey way of displaying multiple images in the same frame, by allowing you to select a frame quadrant in which to load an image. Thanks to sophisticated ximtool support, we have removed that functionality in favor of tiling frames. Tiling is available from the Control Panel. It allows multiple frames to be displayed at one time. You move the mouse from frame to frame to change frames, but without losing sight of the other frames. WCS, cursors, etc. all work as expected in this scheme.