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'm very new to APP and I am still in the Free Trial period, neither would I regard myself as a 'power user', so forgive me if this has been covered before.
I was working through the star colour calibration and at what I thought was the end I clicked 'OK Save File'. When that panel popped up I had second thoughts, so cancelled the save, thinking that 'cancel' would just cancel the save function, but to my horror then found that the star colour calibration tool was also closed, along with all my parameter settings! Fortunately, I could remember a lot of them so repeating the exercise wasn't too onerous.
It does also seem to me that there might be occasions where one might want to try different settings and save the results from each, so it would be very useful if the 'save' function could be separated from 'close tool' function. Would this be possible please?
Ian
@rawcoll That indeed would be very nice. As it turns out, Mabula recently announced this about saving user settings:
Thanks for your prompt reply.
Yes, I did see the much requested feature of being able to save projects, and I did think it could be an answer to my request. But its usefulness here does rely very much on the nature of its implementation, as yet unknown of course. To be honest I was seeking a much simpler implementation of having two buttons rather than one, say 'save' and 'OK and save' (or perhaps 'save and close'), the former one just saving the file, and the latter both saving the file and closing the tool. But in either case, the 'cancel' button on the save pop-up should cancel the act of saving the file alone, taking you back to where you were before you clicked the 'save' or 'OK and save'. This is standard practice with most other software applications I believe.
Ian
