VStar 2.21.3 released

VStar 2.21.3 has been released. The last release was in August 2020.

For details of how to access VStar see https://www.aavso.org/vstar-overview and for the complete list of changes, see the Change Log.

Thanks to Maksym Pyatnytskyy (Max), Paul York, Michelle Dadighat, Cliff Kotnik.

While I review and merge all changes into the main code branch, thanks goes in particular to Max who took on more issues than I did towards this release. I appreciate the ease of our collaboration Max.

Thanks also to Sara Beck (as always) and Bert Pablo.

Some of the key changes in 2.21.3:

• Plugins
  • Improvements to the Plugin Manager to allow all plugins to be installed, updated or deleted in a single operation
  • Inclusion of all current plugins in the Windows installer (not zip file)
  • TESS QLP FITS Observation Source plugin
  • VSX Query plugin enhancements
  • LightKurve plugin
  • Addressed infinite value errors in AoV period search plugin
  • Multi-space separator added to Flexible Text Format plugin
  • Observation source streams were not always being closed
  • CMag was empty after loading data via "New star from AAVSO Database
  • HJD converter declination dialog was not handling negative degrees
• Plotting library version update
• Chart properties added to Preferences
• Plot rendering order can now be reversed in Plot Control dialog
• Improvements and fixes to model functions, e.g. consistency of model precisions (Fourier, polynomial) as shown in Models dialog
• Improved "no observations" error message for all observation sources
• Fixes to simple text format observation flag consistency between reading and writing
• Harmonic search uses numeric tolerance instead of equality for comparison
• Updated Developing VStar Plugins document
• Replaced .vstar file with Java Preferences API internally
• VeLa bug fixes/improvements
  • integers are now internally Java longs
  • variables can no longer change type
  • VeLa dialog Run output does not require VeLa print
• Unit test automation within GitHub (when code is committed+pushed) and corresponding fixes to code/tests that caused test failures outside of local developer environments; this is an example (among other things) of work that happens in the background to improve (via verification in this case) of VStar, but that is invisible within the application itself.

Feel free to post to the forum with questions.

For bugs: https://www.aavso.org/bug-reports

For user manual feedback: https://www.aavso.org/user-manual-feedback

David