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Hugin-2010.4.0beta1 RELEASE NOTES

Hugin is a panorama stitcher and more.  A new version is available.

MIGRATION TO LAUNCHPAD

Tracking of bugs, patches, and features requests for Hugin has switched from
SourceForge to Launchpad.  Hugin's needs have outgrown the SourceForge
tracker.  The project is grateful to SourceForge for providing it with a
nurturing infrastructure since inception.  We hope that the more modern and
feature-rich tracker on Launchpad will enable the project to work through the
backlog of over 200 tickets and process an increasing amount of tickets more
efficiently.

Please report bugs and feature requests at https://bugs.launchpad.net/hugin

TRANSLATIONS

New strings have been added.  Please help us translating the new strings into
your language.  Instructions at
http://wiki.panotools.org/Hugin_translation_guide

DOWNLOAD

The 2010.4beta1 source tarball can be downloaded from sourceforge at
http://sourceforge.net/projects/hugin/files/hugin/hugin-2010.4_beta/h...

This is a sourcecode release.  The project has limited resources and relies on
third parties to produce binaries for the different platforms.  Instructions at
http://wiki.panotools.org/Development_of_Open_Source_tools .  If you have a
build to contribute for your platform, contact the Hugin developers team on
http://groups.google.com/group/hugin-ptx .

A number of users have pledged to provide binaries within a few days after
this tarball release.  Announcements of these binaries are expected in the
coming days on http://groups.google.com/group/hugin-ptx .  If you don't see a
binary for your platform announced, it is most likely that nobody produced one
yet.  Consider contributing one yourself.

This tarball is equivalent to rev/changeset 4611:95c7c055a9d9 in our Mercurial
repository, where it is also tagged 2010.4beta1

Verify its SHA1SUM 82eab19c8d9401d7a5b9d9d835e1c8ade4b87f1a

DEDICATION

This release of Hugin is dedicated to Milko K. Amorth (1960-2010).  Details in
the About menu.

CHANGES SINCE 2010.2.0

This is our third release in 2010.  For the first time Hugin can be considered
feature-complete.  A third-party control points generator is no longer
necessary. This release delivers some major new features, integrates some
projects from the 2010 Google Summer of Code, and includes many general
improvements.

_Built-in Control Points Generator_

For the first time Hugin does not depend on a third-party control points
generator.  cpfind is the result of years of ongoing efforts and Google Summer
of Code projects aimed at delivering a 'patent-free' control points generator.
Third-party control point generators are still supported.

Instead of passing an often incomplete and incompatible set of parameters
through the command line, the built-in control points generator has direct
access to all project information and tools.  It speeds up and optimizes
multi-row matching.  It uses Celeste to identify the sky.  Unlike most of its
predecessors it is multi-threaded and takes advantage of modern multi-core
hardware.

Additionally, Hugin now has the ability to save and load control-point
generators settings from disk, reducing confusion and errors due to the
changes in the command line interface of the third-party control points
generators.

_Improved Unattended Operation_

Many features improve unattended (batch) operation including:
* The Batch Processor has been improved and can now automatically detect
projects.
* The Assistant is now batchable as well, so more operations can be automated
and run unattended.
* More robust Makefiles to drive the stitching process (see Refactored Makefile
Library below

_Improved Interaction and Functionality_

Many features improve user interaction (real-time) including:
* Masks have been extended with two new types to support stacks in the Masks
tab.
* Numeric Transform now supports translation (mosaic mode).
* Photos are now loaded in a background thread.  This means that Hugin
projects can be used immediately without waiting for all the photos to be
read.
* The Stitcher tab is now rearranged and with less jargon to clarify the
process.
* Better compliance with native user interface guidelines on Windows, OS X and
Linux.
* Hints in the Preview window now suggest improvements.

_Improved Reporting of Stitching and System Information_

*System information is shown in About window.
*Stitching now reports more information about the current system.
*Stitching log can be saved for better bug reporting.

_New Command-Line Tools_

* cpfind is a command line interface to Hugin's native 'patent-free'control
point detector.
* icpfind uses the different control point detectors and heuristic control point
detector strategies from the command line. It does not introduce new
functionality, it allows running the different control points detectors with a
unified command structure from the command line.

_Refactored Makefile Library_

Hugin stitches panoramas by chaining together individual commands.  The
stitching process is driven by make a tool known for automatically assembling
software not images.  The list of targets and the commands to reproduce them
are described in a declarative language called a Makefile.  Hugin leverages the
benefits of make for the stitching process. Makefiles make the process easy to
stop and start, postpone or continue on different machines and generally makes
everything very flexible and efficient.  If a panorama has been only partially
edited, the Makefile ensures that only those steps that have changed are
computed again.  Make enables advanced application such as automated stitching
and distributed stitching.

With this release, the stitching logic has been recreated with a new C++
library for creating Makefiles.  This should enable better and more precise
control over the various stitching tools and scripting of other aspects of
panorama creation.

_Libraries and Build Improvements_

* Hugin uses the wxWidgets GUI toolkit.  Support has been added for wxWidgets
2.9.  It is still experimental.  Hugin still supports wxWidgets 2.7 and
recommends 2.8.
* Support for gcc-4.4.4 and gcc-4.5.1 compilers.
* boost 1.34 minimum version required.  At least the following boost libraries
   * filesystem
   * graph
   * iostreams
   * regex
   * signals
   * system
   * thread
* Hugin defaults to saving TIFF files with LZW compression instead of PACKBITS.
This requires a libtiff with LZW support.
* On Linux/Unix systems, libaries are now installed in a private location.
This simplifies things for users who want to run multiple versions of Hugin
simultaneously.

_New Visuals_

Hugin has had the same logo and icon almost since inception.  Unfortunately
the source files have gone lost in time.  Cristian Marchi contributed SVG files
of new logo and icons that are an evolution of the original artwork by Dr.
Luca Vascon. To celebrate the first feature-complete release of Hugin the
project has adopted a new visual appearance.  Moreover all artwork source has
been collected into ./artwork-src.  To facilitate contributions from graphic
designers the generation of the actual buttons and icons has been streamlined
and scripted.

_Other Improvements_

This release has the usual bugfixes, adds minor features, and provides some
more command-line tools for scripting panorama projects.

_Control point generators_

Hugin ships now with its own 'Patent Free' control point generator. You can
still install and configure one of the following control-point generators as
'plug-ins':
* autopano-sift-C
* panomatic
* libpanomatic
* match-n-shift
* Autopano-SIFT
* Autopano freeware version

The project will continue to support the plug-in architecture.

_Upgrading_

Upgrading from previous versions of Hugin should be seamless. If you do have
problems with old settings, these can be reset in the Preferences by clicking
'Load defaults'.

For users compiling from source: note that the minimum version of wxWidgets
supported is 2.7.0, libpano13 needs to be at least 2.9.17, and that Hugin
requires GLEW the OpenGL Extension Wrangler Library, freeglut the OpenGL
utility toolkit, and libGLU the OpenGL utility library.

See the README and INSTALL_cmake files for more information.

Thanks to all the contributors to this release and members of the hugin-ptx
mailing list, too many to mention here.

Hugin can be found at http://hugin.sourceforge.net/
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