[Paraview] ParaView III March Snapshot

[Utkarsh Ayachit]

Hi Folks,

Berk has posted the March snapshot of ParaView III. The download links 
and announcements for all snapshots can be found at: 
http://paraview.org/Wiki/ParaView_III_snapshots

This snapshot includes binaries for Windows, Linux and Mac OS X (intel 
only). The source can be obtained through CVS.

Here are some the things we have been working on:

* Support for Plugins: ParaView 3 provides a much more powerful plugin 
support than that provided by ParaView 2. Examples are provided along 
with the source (in ParaView3/Examples/Plugins). Detailed documentation 
is available at http://www.paraview.org/Wiki/Plugin_HowTo
* Extended Animation support: ParaView 3 now makes it possible to 
animate Camera, Cut/Clip planes etc. There is no track editor at this point.
* Selection: We are working on improving the selection mechanism. 
Currently users can select cells/points by ids, location, or thresholds. 
Surface as well as frustum selections through the data are now possible.
* Plotting: Plot views are now a part of the main view. Splitting a view 
no longer creates a 3D render view by default. User can change the view 
type by right clicking on the view's title bar. Any 1D rectilinear grid 
data can now be plotted either as a XY line plot or a Bar chart.
* Improved dialog for editing color lookup tables.
* Xdmf Reader: Support for reading Xdmf files has now been enabled.

What is coming next month:

* More selection enahancements.
* Fixes/improvements to the Undo/Redo framework.
* Volume rendering interface
* Improved color map editor

On another note, ParaView 3 now requires Qt 4.2.2 to build.

There is still very little documentation. Look at 
http://www.paraview.org/Wiki/ParaView_III to get more information on the 
new features. We will continue adding more documentation to this page as 
we progress. We started working on Qt assistant based online 
documentation. It will be available soon.

Have fun.

Utkarsh.