Hello everyone.
It has been since a year since we started to talk about a new major version of Tulip. A lot of discussions and work later, we're proud to annouce that the first release candidate for Tulip 4 is now available.
This version aims at giving an experience that will be as close as possible to the final version that will come out in the next weeks.
Below are some of the key features available in Tulip 4:
* A fully-redesigned UI. A third of the application has been rewritten to give Tulip a modern, Qt-based GUI.
This new interface allows the user to interact in some new ways with its data by using more intuitive interactions, such as dragging algorithms directly onto the graph.
The main goal was to avoid the complexity of the Tulip 3 GUI while keeping all the features directly accessible to the user.
We decided to remove the dreadful menubars containing the Algorithms to replace it with a side panel, making the algorithms central to the UI.
Tulip 4 welcome screen Main interface at startup Close-up on the algorithms side-bar
* A project-oriented approach. With Tulip 4, we decided to introduce a new file format to store your data saved with Tulip: The TLPX file format. Following the example of the major office software, we created an archived file format
capable of storing several graphs at once associated with any kind of data. This allows the user to manipulate different graph hierarchies into the same project and integrate external files (like textures) in its project file.
* Inter-process communication. One of the major downside in Tulip 3 is that opening multiple projects would always been done in the same window
(and thus into the same process). This made working on different projects simultaneously pretty difficult.
In Tulip 4, each project is run separately into its own process so you can easily work on several projects simultaneousely.
Working on several projects at the same time Installing new plugins
* Improved OpenGL rendering. A lot of work has been done this past year on the 3D rendering engine to make it even faster than it was before. We took advantage of modern technologies like the
Qt's GraphicsViews to improve user interactions and to open the way for a much much cleaner UI.
* A major part of the API has been rethought in order to ease the use of Tulip into a side-project. The process to create C++ plugins has been greatly simplified and developers can now integrate python plugins into Tulip.
This first RC marks the begenning of something new for Tulip. This past year's main goal was to give Tulip the look'n feel of a modern software and we can finally turn ourselves to a lot of exciting new opportunities and new cool features we want to see in Tulip very soon.
So be sure to grab a copy of Tulip 4.0.0 RC1. Any feedback is welcome so feel free to post on our forums or bug tracker if you have any question or if you encounter any issues.
Download links:
Windows
MacOS
Source package
(.tar.gz)
