2026-10-09 APP 2.0.0-beta48 has been released !
This is mainly a bug fix release for the reported bugs in beta47. In addition it has a significant User Interface performance improvement noticable when you need to process 1000s of images in APP.
2026-10-03 APP 2.0.0-beta47 has been released !
This is a very big release... many code optimizations/rewrites, many parts of APP are much faster and more precise, especially star analysis and registration are much faster ! Big mosaics will go much faster 🙂
And we introduce a new preview filter, which includes the new Adaptive Deep Sky Stretch and a General Levels Stretch, this has been long over due. The old preview filter (the panel on the right side to stretch and preview your data) has not been updated for a couple of years and it is a critical part of any APP session.
Adaptive Deep Sky Stretch or ADSS is a much more intuitive stretch algorithm. It is also color preserving (which is a great new addition in itself ! ) which means that the highlights are no longer bleached, color is maintained from the linear data while stretching. You can simply stretch your data using the sky background level and signal width sliders which work much easier and more intuitive. You no longer need to fiddle with the old complicated sliders with zoom buttons. All the zoom buttons for the sliders are made redundant. And you can enter slider values in the slider value fields yourself. I will make a youtube video in the coming days to explain and fully introduce ADSS. Once the video is ready, it will be highlighted on the forum.
RGB Combine upgrade !. The RGB Combine Tool has been rewritten mostly. The tool is faster and easier to use and most importantly, the Luminance slider to inject a luminance channel or channels into the RGB composite is now working correctly. It no longer bleaches the RGB colors. Combined with the new ADSS preview, you will get much better and easier great composites with great color! I will also explain this in a new youtube video.
Is there a plan to also release APP as a library in the form of a JAR file?Â
If that was the case, one could make wonderful bindings on top of your great work! I for one would write a clojure (a jvm side lisp) wrapper, allowing this to run live through a repl where I could script away common tasks or even save entire workflows for each photo as clojure scripts so I could reproduce any photo at any time on any machine precisely as I had done it originally. This could give us (the astrophotography noobs) much deeper insights as we learn this fine art and could see what we did and how it improved.
Thanks for a wonderful program!
Thanks for the compliment! As I program myself as well I actually had a little conversation about something similar. But for now it's not something to be made possible, it would complicate the program fast at a stage where it's still fully in development. So great idea, but not going to happen at the moment.
Thank you for replying!
Yes, I can see that the program is in full development swing. I am not expecting this to happen at the moment, just thought of instilling this ideas in the designers head. As a developer myself, I know that having this concept in mind adjusts the architecture and design of the application such that later it will be easier to export the functionalities as APIs.Â
I have worked a lot on very memory intensive projects on the JVM and I have lots of ideas for you to improve performance, reduce GC jitter, etc. For example I am not sure if you are currently using DirectByteBuffers, which allocates memory off heap (think malloc, thus reducing GC stress). This approach will also allows for future interfacing with jni code which could then take advantages of SIMD instructions ( https://www.quora.com/What-is-SIMD ) for very fast computations (think GPU on top of the CPU). Unfortunately the JVM as it is currently lacks proper automatic vectorization which this kind of processing could easily use.
If you would like to have some technical session, I would be thrilled to help out. Astrophotography, although a hobby at this point in my life, is a big passion of mine as well as programming, so I would love to contribute 🙂
Yep, same! 🙂 Although not Java and still starting out in the scene. I'll tag Mabula so he can chime in. @mabula-admin
