What’s new in Observation Manager 0.920?

As the first release candidate for 0.920 is available for download, it’s time to see what’s in the new version.

A minor change comes in the sorting of observation (and session) dates. In former releases the latest observation (session) was listed at the bottom of the left hand side navigation tree and the observation table.
With 0.920 the default sorting changed so that latest observations appear on the top of each list.

Another tiny change comes to the observer entries in the left hand navigation tree. All observations which were made as additional observer (via the session element), are now also listed below the corresponding observer. To indicate observations done by that observer and observations done as additional observer, the additional observer observations are shown in a light gray.

Another very useful new feature is the export of missing objects from a statistics result. In case you wanna observe all 110 Messier objects and there’re still some missing. In the past Observation Manager could tell you, how many observations are missing for your goal, but you couldn’t export that list and use it the other night. With 0.920 you’ll get the ability to export a list of missing objects either to XML (<OAL> format) or to HTML.

Talking about statistics…if you’ve an observation project ongoing (say the Herschel 400) any you want to get some statistics on your project (How many objects have been observed?), you can now create observation projects (like the Herschel 400) for Observation Manager. Basically the observation project is a plain TXT list passed over to Observation Manager, who’ll be able to compute statistics from that list. As a first out-of-the-box project the DeepSky extension comes along with a Herschel 400 project file.
More on observation projects, in one of the next blogs. So stay tuned…

Needless to say that 0.920 has again several bug fixes and usage enhancements onboard.
E.g. while loading/exporting/saving/… you’ll get a little animated wait pop-up to let you know, OM is working.
Also the column sizes and the size of the main window frames are now saved and recovered during the next startup.
The DeepSky extension now comes with the revised NGC/IC catalog by Wolfgang Steinicke, that replaces the outdated HCNGC.

So there’s plenty of reasons to download the next version of Observation Manager. The release candidate is out, and we’re curious to receive your feedback!

Observation Manager – 0.920 Release Candidate 1

The first release candidate for the next Observation Manager Version 0.920 has been released and can be
accessed from the projects webpage at: http://observation.sourceforge.net

Please give it a try and report feedback in our projects forum.

Observation Manager on ohloh.net

Today I’ve updated the Observation Manager page on ohloh.net.
Ohloh brought up some very interesting facts about OM:

According to ohloh.net Observation Manager consists of 47.563 lines of code.
85% of the coding are written in Java, the rest ist XML, XSLT, …
The effort of Observation Manager according to ohloh.net is 13 person years or over 700.000$ (if you take an avg. salary of 55000$/year)

Looking forward…Observation Manager 0.920

With 0.820 out of the door, it’s time to look ahead for the next release.

Here’s what has already made it into 0.920 so far:

• Bugfixing (obviously there’s always something to fix)
  • e.g. the table sorting is now enhanced and works out much better
• Latest observations are now shown at the top of the table (and tree). (No longer at the bottom)
• Table column size is now saved and recovered after startup
• Almost everywhere you can export data to HTML and XML (<OAL>) now.
  • E.g. All entries in the navigation tree allow the XML (<OAL>) export now, besides the existing HTML export
• Observation statistics can now be exported to HTML or XML. Also missing objects (from a catalog) can now be exported to XML and HTML. With that, you’re able to get a handy list of what’s missing on your observing projects
• Introduction of observing projects. It’ll be possible with 0.920 to create simple text files in the OM directory that are treated like catalogs during observation statistics.
  So e.g. you’re observing the Herschel 400. So, you place a list with the Herschel 400 objects as txt file into the OM install directory and OM checks which objects from that list haven already been observed.
• Replace HCNGC catalog with latest revised NGC/IC catalog from Wolfgang Steinicke
• …some minor fixes and enhancements…

Anything missing? Post suggestions, idea, … as comment to this blog.