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.
First, let me say that I think AstroPixelProcessor is fantastic! I predict that it won't be long for it to become the most popular software of its kind. Second, I see there are a large number of RFC posts and likely some (or all) of mine have already been requested. I apologize for that but it is a long list and it would take a very long time to read and sort everything.
The following is a list of things I would like to see in APP (not in any particular order):
- Deconvolution
- Drag and drop files (at least Lights)
- Wheel zoom to zoom centering on where the cursor is (like zooming with the left and right mouse buttons)
- Settings section of the program persistent through sessions including (but not limited to) the following plus a "reset to factory" option. Alternatively: on each panel (e.g. 1) LOAD, 2) CALIBRATE, etc.) have two buttons: “Save as default” and “Restore defaults”
- default directory
- sound (if anything this should be defaulted to OFF!)
- console
- memory
- File selection dialog: Details or List
- Load panel: 3 main functions (multi-processing, Multi-session, auto-detect)
- Calibrate panel: under each calibration frame type: integrate, iterations, create rejection map, detect bad columns, create BPM
- Register: pattern rec descriptors. same camera/optics, interpolation method, save registered frames
- Normalize: neutralize background, interpolation method
- Integrate: weights, integrate, LNC degree/iterations, enable MBB/%, outlier rejection/iterations, pixel interpolation, Integrate mode/scale
- Easier to use Calibrate star colors (more automatic?)
- For Tools, especially Combine RGB, Undo/Redo function after “calculate”
- On Preview panel (right side of screen):
- Undo/Redo
- Button to reset all sliders to default
- setting for auto stretch (comes up as 15% every time now)
- setting for saturation checkbox
- File List:
- Column for filter
- Selectable font size (in settings section) or normal, medium, large
- Additional sorts: filter, binning
Thanks for this excellent list of suggestions! Yes, many are on the list of things to do, the main problem right now is that Mabula is the sole programmer so that means his focus is on the big things first. GPU acceleration is going to be a big improvement so that's where it's at right now. The rest will defintely come, but I have no schedule for that.
Thanks for the kind words!
I understand, but there is one function that is causing me (and others?) to look elsewhere for software and that is that APP doesn't include deconvolution! This has been a request for a long time and is an important function.
I agree that GPU acceleration is an important enhancement for performance but we have been asking for deconvolution for a long time. It is a fairly large functional deficiency is APP that I feel should have priority over performance enhancements.
Maybe we should have a poll to see what other users think?
Yes I understand. Deconvolution is nice in certain cases, not a feature that many use standard btw. But ofcourse it'll be on the roadmap for post-processing improvements. To do things like that with the same quality as APP is now doing the calibration, is what takes time unfortunately but this amount of in-depth attention to getting it right does make APP stand out now and for that it's already getting more popular fast. At the moment many will use multiple programs to achieve their desired end-result and the goal for APP is to get the best tools into 1 processor. We wish we had a time-machine though. 😉
