ANNOUNCE: GENIUS 1.0.17 the "Oklahoma!" 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

A bunch of changes accumulated over the past half a year again and so it is
time for another release.  This is the last release from Wisconsin.  Next is
coming from Oklahoma (OSU-Stillwater to be precise), there's just not enough
tornadoes in Wisconsin.  The most visible changes in this release are 1)
Using Cairo (having updated to new GtkExtra) so graphs are antialiased on
screen 2) dependent axis can be automatically scaled on line plots (and in
fact does so by default).  There are lots of other minor changes and fixes
see below.

In any case, Genius is one of the oldest GNOME projects going back to late
1997.  It was 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 1.0.17:

* Better precision for graphs especially when zoomed it a lot, and make font
  smaller if needed
* Line plots and parametric plots now allow "fit dependent axis" automatically
  when y limits are unspecified.  And this is the default in the UI
* Add export of graphs to PDF directly
* Line plot step size is adaptive, also line plots now detect jumps and do not
  draw a connecting line, try plotting UnitStep for example
* Use arrow keys to move around a line plot
* left-right arrow keys rotate surface plot
* All plots are now antialiased on the screen (due to GtkExtra update and
  cairo usage).
* Update internal GtkExtra to 3.0.5, and forward port all our changes/fixes
  (this gets us closer to supporting GTK+3 at some point)
* Completion for "help on function" in the GUI
* Fix FindRootBisection and FindRootMullersMethod
* Factors is now a lot faster on very large numbers (as fast as Factorize)
* Fix placement of labels on surface plots
* A few small fixes and updates to the documentation
* A few minor bugfixes
* Update mersenne primes (new one is known)
* Translation updates (Daniel Mustieles, Marek Černocký, Dimitris Spingos,
  Jiro Matsuzawa, Kjartan Maraas, Martin Srebotnjak, Matej Urbančič,
  Gil Forcada, Alexandre Franke, Joe Hansen, Miguel Rodríguez)

* During making of these changes the author (Jiri) was partially supported by
  NSF grant DMS 0900885 and the University of Wisconsin-Madison

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, OpenSUSE, and probably other
distribution repositories, so check those.  Usually you want 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

--
Jiri (George) Lebl, http://www.math.wisc.edu/~lebl/ or http://www.jirka.org/