Thursday, November 22, 2007

2.0 Dev Release 10

This update to 2.0 sees some reorganization to make it easier and less confusing to browse images.

The "Locations" view has been replaced by a new "Time Intervals" view. Previously, MMB panoramas contained all the images from one location. This doesn't always work very well, since increasingly, the rovers are staying in one place for long periods of time, and images often overlap. So now, panoramas and slideshows are organized by "time intervals".

In the "Viewer Settings" there is a new "Time intervals" section with controls for how panoramas and slideshows are split up. The options are:

- "Split by location": Images are grouped by rover location.
- "Split by sol": Images are grouped by sol (day)
- "Split by elapse minutes": Images are grouped by time interval. A new time interval is created if there are more than X minutes between images.



Another change is that the "Images" view now shows images from the currently viewed time interval only. The selected time interval is displayed at the top of the view.



So for example, take Spirit's "McMurdo" pan, which was split over two different rover locations (technically; actually the rover did not move). You can use the new controls to browse, in panorama mode, each day's images separately. Or, you can view the images from each location separately. Or, you can now (for the first time in MMB) view the entire panorama, including both locations at once - by specifying the start sol (809) and the end sol (1009), and turning off all the "split by" options. Here's a view:



As usual, you can get the latest version by using the Update Software feature. If you update, you may see an "unable to restore all workbench views" dialog the first time you start up. This is because the Locations view no longer exists; just click "ok" and open the Time Intervals view using the Windows menu.