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.