GPlates 0.9.9 released

GPlates 0.9.9 released

Changes since 0.9.8:

  • New paleomagnetic functionality including the ability to:
    • create a Virtual Geomeomagnetic Pole (VGP) feature,
    • generate a total rotation pole adjustment between the VGP and the geographic pole,
    • specify when Virtual Geomeomagnetic Pole features are displayed.
  • Colouring improvements including the ability to:
    • preview the effects of each colouring option,
    • load colour tables from GMT CPT files for user-defined colouring,
    • change colouring globally or per feature collection.
  • New tools to delete, split and clone features.
  • Support for "unsaved changes" to feature collections:
    • highlight feature collections with unsaved changes in red,
    • new icons in the GPlates main window to indicate unsaved changes and file loading errors,
    • exiting GPlates brings up a dialog with options to save unsaved changes.
  • Export improvements:
    • all exports (including time-sequence and single snapshot exports) have been unified into a single dialog,
    • new export method: - export the globe view as a single image (or time-sequence of images),
    • new export method: - export total rotation poles for each plate id relative to the anchor plate or relative to the next plate in the circuit,
    • filenames of exports (notably time-sequence exports) can have parameters (such as reconstruction time) inserted in them.
  • Generate CitcomS 3.1 meshes inside GPlates.
  • Cookie-cutting and plate id assignment has been extended:
    • to regular static polygon features (in addition to topological closed plate boundary features),
    • to assign time of appearance/disappearance (in addition to plate ids).
  • Topological closed plate boundary improvements including:
    • automated reversal of topological line sections,
    • support for feature ids in Shapefiles,
    • more flexibility when adding topological line sections (such as adding same section multiple times to a boundary).
  • Option to rotate daughter/children plates in the "Modify Reconstruction Pole" tool.
  • Other improvements including:
    • conjugate plate id option in "Create Feature" dialog for the relevant features,
    • read/write 4-digit plate ids from/to PLATES line format files,
    • multipoint support in PLATES line format (eg, hotspots),
    • root of time-dependent raster filenames can vary, for example, "imageA" and "imageB" in "imageA-0.jpg" and "imageB-1.jpg".

GPlates 0.9.9 compiles and runs on Windows Vista, Windows XP, Linux and MacOS X. Qt 4.3.2 (or above) and CMake are required. Download GPlates 0.9.9 from the Download page.

GPlates-compatible data have been made available. For more information, see the Download page.