Hi Folks, 

Larch 0.9.51 is now available for download and use.   It's been several months since the last release, and there have been some important improvements to XAFS data processing and to the XAS Viewer application:

 - Parameters saved in an Athena Project File are now correctly saved and read into XAS Viewer (thanks Tyler Valentine!)

 - There is now a simple "Apply to all marked groups" feature for pre-edge peak fitting. That is, you can define a pre-edge peak model with one data set and then apply it to many others, either inspecting the individual fits or saving a CSV file with all the parameters and uncertainties for each fit to each data set.

 

 - XAS Viewer can now import multiple scans from a Spec file (thanks Mauro Rovezzi for help with this).  It may seem that Specfiles are "legacy", but the reader should also be able to handle the ESRF Bliss HDF5 files (as read in with the silx package, from ESRF), which is their way of efficiently stacking multiple scans into a single binary file.  While support for this here should be considered "beta" (or maybe "alpha"!), it is also reasonable to expect that this or a similar HDF5 format file will become a common way to collect and store XAFS data. 

 - There are binary installers for Windows, MacOSX, and Linux. There are also now "GetLarch.sh" and "GetLarch.bat" scripts (that are very short) that can be run to do the download and install, essentially mimicking what the binary installer does.  This may be useful for folks wanting to install Larch on multi-user servers or in existing (or "other") Python environments.  

This might also be useful for those who run into permissions issues, especially on MacOS, where installing a package from an untrusted source is often blocked by default.  With the installer script, the unprivileged user is simply running a script that downloads a bunch of files and places them in the home folder. 

These scripts might also be useful for those who run into problems downloading very large files from millenia.cars.aps.anl.gov, as the installer scripts will use Anaconda and PyPI resources that are better distributed throughout the world.

... which brings me to a final note (I'll send out another message next week):  The APS will have a planned power outage from April 30 to May 4 . This will take millenia.cars.aps.anl.gov off-line for those 5 +/- 1 days.  That machine hosts the binary installers and also this mailing list.   Mail sent to this list during that time will likely be lost (email routing servers can handle destination servers being down for a few hours, but not days).   So, if you're planning on sending announcements here, either do it before April 29 or wait until May 5. 

If you have any questions, problems, or suggestions, please let me know.

--Matt