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.
I love APP and I'm a firm supporter, but I believe we've been waiting for the above for at least three years. In fact one post I see from Vincent states it's 'high up the list of priorities' since August 2020.Â
It's always promised 'in the next beta' or 'in the next version' but as the years pass, it's universally failed to materialise.Â
When can expect these essential features so we don't have to rebuild an entire project from scratch every time we add data, or abandon a multi-hour integration because the laptop went to sleep?Â
Hi @phrenos,
Thank you very much for your post and question.
Indeed, we have been working on this feature for a long time already and many of the improvements that we have implemented in the past couple of years are in preparation for save/load of whole projects. A lot of metadata needs to be stored, saved, remembered to be able to do this actually. The fact that APP saves all settings these days between APP restarts was implemented in anticipation of this as you can understand. The save/load projects is the only feature left for us to release APP 2.0 stable officially so we have no reason to delay as you can hopefully understand. It is just much more work than we expected to properly implement this and we have been very busy lately as well. I hope to release a first version with this feature soon actually, hope that answers your question for now?
Mabula
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