Mar 28 2026 APP 2.0.0-beta40 will be released in 7 days.
It did take a long time to have the work finished on this and it will have a major performance boost of 30-50% over 2.0.0-beta39 from calibration to integration. We extensively optimized many critical parts of APP. All has been tested to guarantee correct optimizations. Drizzle and image resampling is much faster for instance, those modules have been completely rewritten. Much less memory usage. LNC 2.0 will be released which works much better and faster than LNC in it's current state. And more, all will be added to the release notes in the coming weeks...
Update on the 2.0.0 release & the full manual
We are getting close to the 2.0.0 stable release and the full manual. The manual will soon become available on the website and also in PDF format. Both versions will be identical and once released, will start to follow the APP release cycle and thus will stay up-to-date to the latest APP version.
Once 2.0.0 is released, the price for APP will increase. Owner's license holders will not need to pay an upgrade fee to use 2.0.0, neither do Renter's license holders.
Hi,
Have just upgraded to beta 20 and am experiencing crashes while doing a mosaic of previously stacked panels. Everything goes fine and APP announces that it has finished and saves the file but, when it tries to load it into the image viewer, APP quits and I get a message saying that 'Java quit unexpectedly'.
I can open the final mosaic that APP created in a FITS viewer with no problems (and it looks nice) and I can re-load it into APP if I restart the software....but as soon as I try to load it into the image viewer then it crashes everything again. The Mosaic is 2GB but I am running an M1 Mac with 64GB memory.
I have the Apple crash log for when Java quits if that helps (but not sure how to export it - could do a screen shot of the first page)
Any advice greatly appreciated.
thanks, Jon
Edit by Mabula: fixed in 2.0.0-beta29
Thanks for the report, I'll notify Mabula!
I have now tried to reproduce this strange behaviour using both beta 9 and beta 2 (albeit on a different - Intel based - Mac). In these cases the Java does not crash but the image viewer displays quite a colourful result - see below!
As before with beta 20, the mosaic is actually produced without any problem and can be easily viewed with a FITS viewer....it just seems to cause problems for the APP image viewer. I enclose the mosaic file as seen in QuickFits for comparison.
Hi Jon,
Thank you very much for sharing your issue,
I am working on a stability issue with beta20 with the highest priority. I think you might suffer from this as well. I will release a new version with the fix a.s.a.p.
Mabula
many thanks!
I'm afraid that I still can't open a mosaic created in APP in the image viewer, even with beta 22. Loads into APP OK but when I double click it to open in the image viewer, it starts to load, gets to about 90%, then crashes both Java and APP. Need to restart computer to recover Java. M1 Mac running OS 13.4.1. Mosaics are about 2 GB and I have tried several of them with the same result. As noted above they open fine in a FITS viewer so don't appear to be corrupted?
p.s. I have just determined that this is related to the Open GL button. With this on? (ie green) the image viewer will crash, with it off (orange CPU showing) then it will load the file fine. Don't know what that means but it is reproducible...
Pressing that button will disable the use of a GPU to be used for the viewer (and enables CPU rendering). This apparently points to either a driver issue or something else, as you're using a Mac I'll ask Mabula what he thinks.
Hi Jon @jdwood,
Thank you very much for reporting this.
This error is clear, something does not work well with OpenGL on the new Apple Silicon computers and this error is very likely caused by a bug in an external library that we use to support OpenGL with APP. I need to report this error upstream so they can fix this in their library. To be sure, can you upload the mosaic file here, so I can test it as well on my M1 mac, maybe I can create a workaround for now to have APP load the image automatically with OpenGL disabled so the application does not crash.
https://upload.astropixelprocessor.com/
username: uploadData
password: uploadTestData
Please make a folder like : JonWoodhead-OpenGL-AppleSilicon-bug
and let me know once uploaded.
To be clear, this bug has been introduced by using a newer version of this OpenGL library a couple of versions ago, beta2 and beta9 were using an older version which also did not work well as you got the rainbow result, the rainbow happens if the texture size is reported incorrectly or if the library fails to read it correctly from the macOS OpenGL driver.
Mabula
thanks for looking at this Mabula,
I have uploaded an example file as requested. Sorry that it is large - these are 'intermediate panels' of a very large mosaic that I have been working on. Still need to work out whether my machine has the strength to pull all of them together into a final image!
Hi Jon @jdwood,
This issue is finally fixed in 2.0.0-beta29. APP will not crash and the image will be shown properly on Apple Silicon macs. Thank you very much for your patience 😉
Will try to release it soon!
Mabula
@mabula-admin great news! All thanks to you for all your hard work Mabula. cheers, Jon
