ANNOUNCE: GENIUS 1.0.6 the "Spring!" release

[Jiri Lebl <jirka 5z com>]

Genius is a general purpose calculator with many advanced capabilities.
To find out more go to:
http://www.jirka.org/genius.html

As I've mentioned before, I've been using Genius in teaching and so I've made
a bunch of new improvements.  I'm also writing a set of notes (textbook) for
undergraduate differential equations, so I needed to output to be slightly
prettier.  Also we draw vectorfield solutions now.

Also I've gotten finally tired of libgnome stuff and so it is now purged.
This reduces the ldd output of gnome-genius by a few libs.  Much other behind
the scenes cleanup is done as well.

I've also cleaned up the internal interfaces a bit to use proper genius
name spaces (Still not perfect).  This probably breaks existing plugins.
Except I know of no existing plugins.  So it likely breaks nothing.  I'm
actually thinking of removing the plugin interface.  It is just taking up
space I think.

I've also been optimizing startup speed.  This should now be again slightly
improved.  Both for the GNOME and the command line interface.  The command
line interface fired up pretty fast before already, but it is faster still
now.  The GNOME interface is probably noticeably faster due to also the lack
of libgnome(ui) init nonsense.

In any case, Genius is one of the oldest GNOME projects, it has been the
original GNOME calculator before I got wild ideas about it doing absolutely
everything.  It is programmable, has a powerful language and handles many fun
features including support for matrices, rational numbers, and nice 2D and 3D
plotting.  The GUI version requires GNOME2 (at least glib2 if you don't want
a GUI) a recent enough GMP library and the MPFR library.  You can still use
the command line version if you prefer non-gui interface.

Here are the news in 1.0.6:

* Draw grid and x/y axis on lineplots in gray, much better readability
* Draw solutions for vector fields
* Add VectorfieldDrawSolution and VectorfieldClearSolutions
* AskString now allows setting a default
* LinePlotDrawLine can change the plot window and draw arrows
* Read-only files are handled properly
* Clip all lines to within the plot window
* LinePlotWindow, SurfacePlotWindow now update the zoom immediately
* Fix zooming into vectorfield/slopefileld/parametric plots
* Fix flicker when plotting
* Fix line plot scale precision in case the x and y axis have very different
  scales
* Remove dependence on libgnome/ui
* PLUGIN API CHANGE: interface namespace is cleaned up.  But I don't know of
  any plugins that exist and thus break.
* An icon for the plot button
* Some optimizations
* Several other minor bugfixes
* Translation updates (Stéphane Raimbault, me)

http://download.gnome.org/sources/genius/1.0/
ftp://ftp.5z.com/pub/genius/
http://www.jirka.org/genius.html

Genius is in Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora, GARNOME and probably other distribution
repositories, so check those.  Usually you wan to install two packages:
genius and gnome-genius (perhaps also gnome-common on some distros).  Of
course it will be a little bit before this version hits those servers ...

Have fun,

Jiri

--
George <jirka 5z com>
   Examine what is said, not who speaks.
                       -- Arabian Proverb