VStar Version 2.22.0 Release - Please update your version!

Affiliation
American Association of Variable Star Observers (AAVSO)
Fri, 06/03/2022 - 14:01

Hello All,

I am happy to announce that a new version of VStar is now available, thanks to a lot of hard work on the part of David Benn, Maksym Pyatnytskyy and others.

https://www.aavso.org/vstar

Many of the changes had to do with bug fixes both to VStar itself and to various plugins. The full list of changes can be seen here:

ChangeLog

In order to see the updated plug-ins in the "Plug-in Manager", you will need to open "Preferences" (the pink gear icon), select the "Plug-ins" tab and click "Set Defaults".

We also wanted to announce that Java Web Start will no longer be supported. This means that if you were using vstar.jnlp to launch VStar, you should stop using that, delete the link from your computer, and instead, download the latest version of VStar from here: https://www.aavso.org/vstar. The Web Start app will still work until August 1, 2022 but it only uses the previous version and will not be up-to-date.

The reason for this change is that Java Web Start technology has been deprecated by its developers and that most operating systems are not happy to support it. The only drawback is that whenever a new version of VStar is released, you will have to download it from the AAVSO website (or GitHub) again, but we feel that this change is worth the effort because of the aggravation associated with Web Start for many users.

Best wishes,
Sara