Hi folks, I am pleased to announce a new version of Athena today. The source code tarball and windows executable are on my web site. Today's version offers three significant new features: 1. A fairly major user-interface change 2. The ability to fetch data files from web sites 3. An improved merging algorithm Please note that I am making use of a very recent feature of Ifeffit (the "nofx" array function) in the new merging algorithm. Windows users need to update to the version of the big Ifeffit installer from January 22, 2003. Linux, Unix and OSX users should be using Ifeffit version 1.0076 or later. The Windows installer and the ifeffit source code can be found at Matt's web site http://cars9.uchicago.edu/ifeffit/download.html If you are not running Ifeffit 1.0076 or later, then merging WILL NOT WORK in Athena 0.8.014. So, please, upgrade. I'll describe each of those features in detail below. I'd like to specifically thank Matt (who suggested the web thing) and Adam Web (who pointed out a problem with the merging algorithm). I'd also like to mention to all the people who have been asking for PCA in Athena that it's moving closer to the front of my TODO list. The change to the user interface is needed to be able to put PCA into Athena in a sensible manner. Regards B The details about each new feature: 1. Although the user interface change is pretty significant, I think it will be easy for current users to adapt to. Indeed, I think most people will appreciate the added functionality that the change allows. In earlier versions of Athena, data processing and analysis chores such as alignment, calibration, and log-ratio were done by interacting with a special dialog that popped up in a separate window. This separate window performed a grab, which means that you could not interact with the main window until you were done with the dialog and had dismissed it. Now, each of the various chores that previously used a pop-up dialog works by replacing the main part of the main window with the dialog specific to that analysis chore. Thus, when you, say, go to align data, the part of the main window where you specify background removal and Fourier transform parameters gets replaced by various menus and entry boxes relevant to that chore. If that's not clear, check out the new screenshots at http://leonardo.phys.washington.edu/~ravel/software/exafs/screenshots.html#a... There are screenshots showing each of the eight alternate views in Athena. Not only does this reduce the number of windows that Athena throws up on the screen, it also allows you to use the groups list and the plotting buttons while one of the alternate views is displayed. For example, you can now view one or more data groups in R-space *while* aligning. Chores like alignment and difference spectra which require specifying a second data data group now work by selecting the second data group from the group list. 2. You can now read data files from web sites using an extremely primitive interface. In the File menu, there is an item which says "Open URL". When you select this, the Echo area at the bottom of the screen gets replaced by a bright orange text entry box. If you type in the fully resolved URL of a data file somewhere on the web, Athena will fetch and import that file. This is not extremely convenient because you have to type in the exact URL (or use cut and paste, of course). I have not (yet) implemented a mouse-driven browser of any sort. I may in the future if this feature proves popular. One helpful feature I did implement is that Athena keeps a history of files downloaded during the current Athena session. If you hit the up or down arrows while the URL text entry box has the focus, you will scroll up and down in the history of fetched data files. If you want to try it, I put some iron foil data on my web site. Enter this URL in the orange box: http://leonardo.phys.washington.edu/~ravel/misc/fe.060 This feature will work for Windows users. It will work for other platforms only if you have the LWP perl modules installed. Because that is a very large and frequently changing package, I am not comfortable distributing it with the horae package. If you are a linux, unix, or OSX user and the "Open URL" thing is greyed out, then you will need to install LWP. You can grab the latest version of the Bundle::LWP package from http://search.cpan.org/author/GAAS/libwww-perl-5.69/ Alternately, you can use perl's CPAN interface. At the command line, type perl -MCPAN -e shell then at the CPAN prompt type install Bundle::LWP 3. The merging algorithm has changed. Before, the marked data groups were merged after interpolating them onto the abscissa grid of the first marked group in the groups list. Now, Athena determines what is the longest abscissa range common to all marked groups. The reason for this change is that the prior algorithm would extrapolate if a marked group had a shorter abscissa range than the first group. Often this isn't a problem, but it can lead to very strange and undesirable results in the merged data. I am modestly confident that I have merging working correctly again in all cases. I encourage anyone using the merging algorithm to send me a project file if they suspect that bugs remain. -- Bruce Ravel ----------------------------------- ravel@phys.washington.edu Code 6134, Building 3, Room 222 Naval Research Laboratory phone: (1) 202 767 5947 Washington DC 20375, USA fax: (1) 202 767 1697 NRL Synchrotron Radiation Consortium (NRL-SRC) Beamlines X11a, X11b, X23b, X24c, U4b National Synchrotron Light Source Brookhaven National Laboratory, Upton, NY 11973 My homepage: http://feff.phys.washington.edu/~ravel EXAFS software: http://feff.phys.washington.edu/~ravel/software/exafs/