New Field Selector panel layout. The DataSources pane is now a set of tabs which allows for quick switching between sources and quick access to the properties. The old Times panel is now a general Data Subset panel which allows you to temporally and/or spatially subset data before display.

When there are multiple displays (view managers), the Display Control tab of the Dashboard now categorizes the controls by their display. This makes it easier to tell which control is in which display. You can also access the View Manager menus and properties from the tab. There is a new icon for docked control windows which allows quick access to the Properties dialog.

The user interface for many of the tools (Parameter Alias editor, Parameter Defaults editor) have been greatly streamlined and standardized. For example, save, import and export functions are now all under the File menu of each dialog.

You can now display parameters on isobaric surfaces as topography using the appropriate 3D surface displays, by selecting a parameter and the isobaric geopotential height field.

You can now have labels on color filled contours. At present, they are white. The default is to not label them.

In previous versions of the IDV, plan view displays of 2D data were located at the bottom of the box. You can now position them anywhere in the box.

In previous versions, several of the display controls had a Data Range widget which controlled the range of the displayed data. This has been changed to Visible Range and is disabled by default. You can enable this to exclude data outside the range. In some cases this would be preferrable to using a transparent color table since transparency has some inherent problems.

There are several new additions to the Display Control Properties dialog. You can now customize the legend and display labels and save off preferences for each of these.

The display list labels which are shown in the main display are now set on by default. You can set preferences for the size, color and font used with these labels either through the global preferences, the View Manager properties or the individual display properties. Times in the labels can be formatted independently from the defined user preferences.

In addition to lat/lon bounding box and/or strides for grids read through the netCDF interface, you can also use the Data Subset panel of the Field Selector to select a specific level instead of reading the whole volume for plan view displays. This significantly reduces the amount of data that needs to be retrieved from the remote server.

The image and movie capture facilities have been expanded to allow the use of Google Earth KML as a valid output. For best results, the projection should be a rectilinear (e.g. lat/lon) projection. Combining this with the ISL facility, users can automate the creation of products to be displayed in GE. The IDV can also read in some forms of KML files.

Users can now define their own key and mouse mappings for standard functions in the IDV. Users can select from a set of predefined mappings (IDV, VisAD, Google Earth) or create their own customizations. Use the Navigation tab in the Preferences Manager (Edit->Preferences).

The plugin facility for the IDV has been greatly improved and enhanced. The Plugins Manager now allows you to load in some standard plugins available on the Unidata web site. You can also view the contents of a plugin. A new Plugin Creator has been added to allow users to create their own plugins for customizing the IDV. Both of these tools are now located under the Tools menu.

The IDV can be scripted to create and manipulate images and movies. The scripting is accomplished through an XML file: IDV Scripting Language (ISL). The ISL file can be opened from a running IDV or one can be passed to the IDV as a command line argument. See the ISL section of the IDV User's Guide for more information.

All timesteps of an animation are displayed as soon as they are available instead of waiting until all are rendered. In previous versions, this was only done for isosurfaces and contours.

Several issues (see Bug Fixes below) relating to the display of vector fields have been addressed which improves the overall rendering display time.

Using the new level subsetting features for grids significantly reduces the amount of time for loading in plan views of data.

Significant improvements in the reading and displaying of point data have been made in this release.

The amount of memory needed to display radar volumes has been reduced (but is still significant).

A new contouring algorithm is being used to improve the speed with which contours and contour labels are drawn. The memory consumption for contours of sparse or fine grids has been reduced.

• Dash pattern for map lines shows correctly on Linux
• Wind vectors colored by another were not showing the right colors
• Wind fields were being loaded twice
• Adding in a wind vector or barb field causes a redraw of all displays
• Isosurfaces and streamlines now display over satellite images
• Color bars and labels weren't displaying in the correct position in the perspective view.
• Setting transparency on color filled contours had no effect.

For a list of outstanding known problems, see the Known Problems page.