News

2009-11-10: GPlates 0.9.7.1 released

Changes since 0.9.5:

• GPlates can now utilise a full screen mode, which is available by pressing F11. This mode is ideal for presenting data and animations using GPlates. It makes the user interface more minimalistic, granting a greater amount of screen space to the main view. This is especially useful on low-resolution devices such as projectors.
• A new Measure Distance Tool has been implemented, allowing precise measurement of the distance between any two chosen points. It also interacts with the digitisation and feature-selecting tools, to enable easy inspection of the distances along polyline geometries and polyline segments.
• Exporting the Total Reconstruction Poles table to CSV can now be done with a choice of delimiters, and more closely adheres to the CSV specifications.
• The previous 0.9.6 release involved the integration of the plate polygon closure workflow into the main stable branch of GPlates. With 0.9.7.1, additional work has gone into improving the user experience and making the topology algorithms more intelligent, and enables the export of geometry sub-segments involved in topologies.

GPlates 0.9.7.1 compiles and runs on Windows Vista, Windows XP, Linux and MacOS X. Qt 4.3.2 (or above) and CMake are required. Download GPlates 0.9.7.1 from the Download page.

GPlates-compatible data have been made available by the EarthByte Project at the University of Sydney, the Centre for Geodynamics at the Norwegian Geological Survey, and the Division of Geological and Planetary Sciences at CalTech. For more information, see the Download page.

2009-06-17: GPlates 0.9.5 released

The massive GPlates 0.9.5 release in fact consists of two simultaneous software releases:

• the “official” release of the GPlates “stable mainline” (like all previous 0.9.x releases), named GPlates 0.9.5
• the “testing” release of the widely-anticipated extension functionality for continuously-closing plates and lithosphere velocity fields which was developed primarily at CalTech, named GPlates 0.9.5 + platepolygon-testing.

The GPlates 0.9.5 release features the following changes since 0.9.4:

• GPlates can now export feature data in the Shapefile format. (This complements the existing ability to import Shapefiles into GPlates as feature data.)
• Additionally, GPlates can now export “reconstructed geometries” (feature geometries at a particular reconstruction time in the past) in both the Shapefile and GMT formats.
• GPlates is now able to display the Earth in a variety of map projections (in addition to the existing 3-D Orthographic Globe projection):
  • Rectangular
  • Mercator
  • Mollweide
  • Robinson
  As was possible with the existing 3-D Orthographic Globe projection, each of these map-projections can be exported as a 2-D geometry snapshot (a 2-D vector-graphics image in the SVG format), for later viewing in a web-browser or vector-graphics editor.
• The advanced functionality of the new Export Animation dialog enables you to harness the power of the GPlates reconstruction engine to create your own “data animations”, exporting a sequence of frames from an animation and saving it to disk in a sequence of files. Currently, the Export Animation dialog offers the following export functions:
  • all reconstructed feature geometries (as GMT .xy files or Shapefiles)
  • a 2-D vector graphics snapshot of the view (as SVG files)
  • all velocity fields (as GPML files)
  More export functions will be added in the future.
• The GPlates main window has enjoyed a minor re-design of its layout, to improve the locality of the controls: Now the reconstruction-time controls are together above the reconstruction view, and the view controls (zoom, choice of map projection, and camera and mouse positions) are together below the reconstruction view. This re-design allowed us to incorporate an integrated animation time-slider in with the time controls.
• GPlates is now released as a MacOS X binary bundle in a .dmg file (in addition to the existing Windows binary installer and the Linux/UNIX and Windows source-code packages). To install GPlates on MacOS X, simply:
  1. double-click on the .dmg file to open the disk image in Finder,
  2. drag the GPlates binary into your Applications folder.
• It's now even easier than before to manipulate geometries interactively. When you're deciding which vertex you want to move using the Move Vertex tool, each vertex will light up yellow when you pass the mouse pointer over it, and the coordinates of the vertex also light up yellow in the Task Panel. You can move vertices of existing feature geometries or vertices of partially-digitised geometries.
• You can now insert vertices into the middle of an existing feature geometry, or even extend the feature geometry at either end, using the new Insert Vertex tool. If the mouse pointer is over a line-section of the geometry, the line-section will light up, and you can click the mouse button once to insert a new vertex. If the mouse pointer is past either end of the geometry, you can click once to extend the geometry from that end.
• You can also delete a vertex from a geometry using the new Delete Vertex tool. The geometry which will be deleted will light up red, and the coordinates of the geometry will also light up red in the Task Panel.
• GPlates offers Better handling of multi-geometries (multiple-geometries per feature): both in the loading and saving of files; and in the feature focus and canvas tools in the user-interface.
• The official GPlates user-manual is now online!

The GPlates 0.9.5 + platepolygon-testing release builds upon the simultaneous GPlates 0.9.5 “stable” release, adding the following advanced extension functionality:

• continuously-closing plates, utilising the new topological geometry functionality for the construction of time-varying topological plate-boundary polygons
• the calculation of lithosphere velocity fields, utilising the calculation of plate-motion velocities at CitComS mesh-node locations
• velocity-field arrow decorations — which are zoom-dependent, so that both the size of the arrows and the visual density of the arrows (i.e., the number of arrows drawn on the visible area of the surface of the Earth) scale automatically with zoom
• the new Topology Sections table which displays, and enables tabular editing of, topologies
• automated generation and export of velocity fields as GML DataBlock instances

GPlates 0.9.5 compiles and runs on Windows Vista, Windows XP, Linux and MacOS X. Qt 4.3.2 (or above) and CMake are required. Download GPlates 0.9.5 from the Download page.

GPlates-compatible data have been made available by the EarthByte Project at the University of Sydney and the Centre for Geodynamics at the Norwegian Geological Survey. For more information, see the Download page.

2008-12-23: GPlates 0.9.4 released

Changes since 0.9.3:

• The transition to the CMake build system has been completed. This new build system replaces both the Autoconf/Automake/Libtool-based build system for Linux and the project files for the MS Visual Studio compilers, in addition to enabling compilation on MacOS X.
• GPlates now compiles and runs on the three main desktop operating systems: Windows, Linux and MacOS X.
• It is now possible to manipulate geometries interactively, dragging vertices using the new Move Vertex tool. This tool can be used on both existing feature geometries, as well as geometries which are in the process of being digitised. When the tool has been selected, the selected geometry will be drawn in grey, while its vertices will be highlighted and draggable.
• Previously, a raster image would always be shown by GPlates to cover the whole globe, from -180 to +180 degrees longitude and -90 to +90 latitude. It's now possible to specify a surface extent of any longitude and latitude range for the raster, enabling rasters of a smaller size to be correctly sized and positioned.
• The Manage Feature Collections dialog offers the ability to reload a file from disk with a single click, as well as the ability to enable or disable a feature collection without unloading or reloading the file.
• It is now possible to save feature collections in GMT format, with a choice of header formats: PLATES4 line header; GPGIM feature properties; or a mixture of the two. It's also possible to export a digitised geometry in GMT format (it was already possible to export a digitised geometry in PLATES4 line-format) during the digitisation process, without needing to create a whole new feature.
• Shapefile attributes may now be edited in the Feature Properties dialog in the same way as native GPGIM property-values.
• The Task Panel can now be resized in the main window, enabling text fields to be widened in order to display longer lines of text.
• All the attributes in a Shapefile may additionally be viewed in a more compact tabular (spreadsheet-like) format, with one attribute per column.

GPlates 0.9.4 compiles and runs on Windows Vista, Windows XP, Linux and MacOS X. Qt 4.3 (or above) and CMake are required. Download GPlates 0.9.4 from the Downloads page.

GPlates-compatible data have been made available by the EarthByte Project and the Centre for Geodynamics at the Norwegian Geological Survey. For more information, see the Downloads page.

2008-10-20: GPlates 0.9.3.1 released

Changes since 0.9.2:

• It is now possible to digitise new feature geometries using the point, polyline and polygon digitisation tools. After a feature geometry has been digitised, an easy-to-use wizard is provided for the creation of a feature, enabling the user to specify the basic properties of the feature such as plate ID, time of existence and name, as well as the feature collection into which the new feature should be placed.
• The new Modify Reconstruction Pole tool enables the interactive modification of the Total Reconstruction Poles which define a reconstruction. The user may drag the geometries of a plate around the globe to modify the Total Reconstruction Pole which reconstructs that plate. When the user is happy with the new position of the plate, he or she may click the “Apply” button to cause a dialog box to appear which lists the calculated finite rotations for review; if the user then clicks the “OK” button, a new Total Reconstruction Pole will be inserted automatically into the loaded rotation file at the appropriate reconstruction time.
• When a feature geometry is focused or a new feature geometry is being digitised, the geometry will be highlighted in white. When a geometry is dragged around the globe, its position will be updated in real time in grey.
• The Task Panel is a new user interface element in the main window which provides status information about whichever feature-interaction tool is currently active. Depending upon which tool is active, this information consists of: a summary of the feature (when the Choose Feature tool is active); a listing of the coordinates which have been digitised so far (when one of the digitisation tools is active); or the adjustment by which the Total Reconstruction Pole has been modified (when the Modify Reconstruction Pole tool is active).
• It is now possible to choose between different feature-colouring schemes (by feature-type, by feature age or by a single user-specified colour), in addition to the existing colouring by plate ID.
• The long-awaited GPML reader is now operational! This reader is able to read all reconstructable feature-types and reconstruction feature-types (Total Reconstruction Poles and Absolute Reference Frames) defined in the GPGIM 1.6 specification. GPML, the GPlates Markup Language, is the GML-based “native” file format of GPlates.
• The XML-conformance of GPML input, output and in-memory storage has been improved, to ensure GPlates handles XML namespaces correctly.
• GPML may be compressed or uncompressed as it is being written to file or read from disk, using the freely-available free software program GZip. GZipped GPML files can be up to 30 times smaller than uncompressed files!
• It is now possible to encode a variety of Shapefile attribute-types, with arbitrary attribute-names, in GPML.
• The internal geometry types, reconstruction mechanism and display graphics have been overhauled to enable GPlates to handle and display polygons and multi-geometries, as well as store duplicate vertices in polylines and polygons.
• Geometric property-values may now be edited in the Feature Properties dialog in the same easy-to-use fashion as non-geometric property-values.

The GPlates 0.9.3.1 release is a minor bugfix to GPlates 0.9.3, to fix a bug in the mapping of Shapefile attributes which was noticed after GPlates 0.9.3 was uploaded, but before any release announcement had been made. There are no other changes from 0.9.3.

Download GPlates 0.9.3.1 from the Downloads page.

GPlates 0.9.3.1 compiles and runs on Linux, Windows XP and Windows Vista. (Support for MacOS X is currently in testing — contact us if you'd like to participate in the testing process!) Qt 4.3 or above is required.

A GPlates-compatible global coastline file and a rotation file may be downloaded from the EarthByte Project Resources page. For more information, see the Downloads page.

A GPlates-compatible sequence of time-dependent global raster images (JPEG images, generated from GMT grid files of dynamic topography created by Bernhard Steinberger at the Norwegian Geological Survey) may be downloaded from the Norwegian Geological Survey FTP site. For more information, see the Downloads page.

2008-05-23: GPlates 0.9.2 released

Changes since 0.9.1:

• In addition to reconstructable features with point- and polyline-geometries, GPlates 0.9.2 is able to display raster images on the globe. These images can represent any kind of imagery or gridded data which covers the whole globe (with the image spanning the longitude range of -180 degrees to +180 degrees, and the latitude range of -90 to +90). GPlates is able to read raster images in the widely-used JPEG image format; once a raster is loaded, it is displayed as an OpenGL texture, enabling GPlates to remain responsive when the globe is rotated or the zoom is changed. (Currently, raster images are not reconstructed by GPlates.)
• GPlates is able to display time-dependent global raster images. The user can instruct GPlates to load a sequence of JPEG image files contained in a folder (each image in the sequence corresponding to a particular instant in geological time) and GPlates will display the appropriate image on the globe for the current reconstruction time. As the user changes the reconstruction time, the raster image on the globe will update accordingly.
• The Query Feature Properties dialog has been extended to enable the editing of GPGIM feature properties in an easy-to-use fashion (using a variety of custom-designed user-interface widgets for the various property types). Thus, GPlates now makes the transition from pure visualisation to editing as well. In addition, the reconstructed geometries of a feature can be displayed in parallel with the present-day geometries that are stored in data files.
• Enhanced synchronisation between the user-interface elements which display the properties of GPGIM features means that when a property is changed, the program will react instantly to update the presentation of the feature — whether the changed property was a text field (which will be updated in the "Clicked" feature table), the time-period of existence of the feature (which may cause the feature to appear or disappear at the current reconstruction time) or the reconstruction plate ID (which may cause the feature to change colour and move to a different reconstructed position).
• The new Total Reconstruction Poles dialog provides a variety of informative representations of the total reconstruction poles (finite rotations) for the current reconstruction time: tables of the relative and equivalent finite rotations for each plate ID in the hierarchy; a tree-like representation of the hierarchy of relative rotations; and the circuit between any plate and the user-specified stationary plate. This dialog also enables the export of the tables of finite rotations in CSV (comma-separated value) format.
• The ability to map attributes in a Shapefile to GPlates Model properties on a per-Shapefile basis enables local Shapefile attribute-naming conventions to be integrated seamlessly into GPlates usage. The user-specified mappings will be saved to disk automatically, enabling GPlates to remember mappings between sessions. The attributes can be mapped to different properties at any time.

Download GPlates 0.9.2 from the Downloads page.

GPlates 0.9.2 compiles and runs on Linux and Windows XP. Qt 4.3 or above is required.

A GPlates-compatible global coastline file and a rotation file may be downloaded from the EarthByte Project Resources page. For more information, see the Downloads page.

A GPlates-compatible sequence of time-dependent global raster images (JPEG images, generated from GMT grid files of dynamic topography created by Bernhard Steinberger at the Norwegian Geological Survey) may be downloaded from the Norwegian Geological Survey FTP site. For more information, see the Downloads page.

An animated screenshot of the new time-dependent raster image functionality in action (using EarthByte data and Bernhard Steinberger's dynamic topography raster images) may be found on the Screenshots page.