
xa-1.2beta
==========

I am pleased to announce the availability of version 1.2beta of the
X11 animation tool "xa".  The code is still in beta release to
encourage more testing and comment before the official stable release.
I would appreciate any suggestions or bug fixes you may have.  The
source code for the beta version can be downloaded via anonymous ftp
from:

   ftp://ftp.x.org/contrib/applications/xa-1.2beta/

This directory also includes static-linked binaries for the following
platforms:

   DEC Alpha running Digital Unix (formerly OSF/1)
   SGI running IRIX 4.x
   Sun Sparc running SunOS 4.1.x

A static-linked binary for Sun Sparc running Solaris 2.x will
hopefully be available soon.

Sources and binaries are also available via my home page at:

   http://www.cita.utoronto.ca/~richards/home.html

Note to compile from the source code you will need the XView 3.x
libraries and include files.  XView is available from the X11R5/X11R6
distribution, the OpenWindows distribution on Suns (typically in
/usr/openwin), or from:

   ftp://ftp.x.org/contrib/libraries/

DEC Alpha and SGI ports of the XView sources are available from:

   ftp://ftp.sdsc.edu/pub/ccms/xview/

DESCRIPTION (from the man page)
-----------
xa is an animation package with an XView Graphical User Interface
(GUI) for use on workstations and terminals running the X11 window
system.  The following image formats are supported:

   Sun rasterfile (8-bit RGB only);
   portable gray map;
   portable pixel map;
   raw gray bytes;
   graphics interchange format (GIF, including animations);
   JPEG; and
   MPEG.

Many other formats can be converted to one of the supported formats
using such utilities as the Netpbm library, xv, and ImageMagick.  The
.Z (compress) and .gz (gzip) compression formats are also recognized.

xa provides the user with an XView panel interface for convenient
access to animation, display, and colormap functions.  There are a
number of options to help maximize the display rate.  On a typical
high-end workstation a display rate of 50 frames/sec or better can be
achieved with 400x400 8-bit images.  These speeds are obtained by
first loading the images into client-resident Ximages then
transferring them to server-resident pixmaps.  Consequently, the
maximum number of frames displayable (and hence the duration of the
animation for a given frame rate) is limited only by the core memory
available to the server.

HISTORY
-------
xa replaces its Sunview predecessor rastool (which was never
officially released) and the subsequent X11 version xrastool.  These
tools were designed to aid in visualization of gravitational N-body
problems carried out at the Institute of Astronomy, Cambridge in
partial fulfillment of the author's Ph.D. thesis.

CREDITS
-------
Thanks to:

-- Beta testers: Yann Ricquebourg and Karl Glazebrook
-- John Bradley, author of xv, for permission to incorporate some of
   his algorithms into the code (these portions are highlighted in the source)
-- Ken Steube and Ming-Jen Chan for DEC port of XView library sources
   (available at ftp://ftp.sdsc.edu/pub/ccms/xview/)
-- Color image quantization ideas: Oleg A. Verevka
-- MPEG support: Greg Ward & Loring Holden
-- Yann Ricquebourg for lots of enthusiasm, new ideas and algorithms (01/96)
-- David Robinson for generously providing alloc_colors algorithm (11/93)

The following packages aided development and/or provided inspiration:

-- xv 3.10a (viewer): Copyright 1994 by John Bradley.
-- rcs 5.7 (revision control system): Copyright 1995 by Paul Eggert.
-- dmalloc 3.1.3 (debug malloc library): Copyright 1995 by Gray Watson.
-- ImageMagick 3.6.6 (viewer): Copyright 1995 E. I. du Pont de Nemours & Co.

The following packages are included in the distribution (possibly modified):

-- the Independent JPEG Group's free JPEG software
-- MPEG Video Software Decoder
-- ooMPEG Object-Oriented MPEG Decoder
-- giftopnm.c from the Netpbm toolkit

COPYRIGHT
---------
xa is Copyright (C) 1993, 1996 by Derek C. Richardson under the terms
and conditions of the GNU General Public License (included with the
source distribution).

AUTHOR
------
Derek C. Richardson, Canadian Institute for Theoretical Astrophysics,
Toronto, CANADA.

BUGS
----
All bug reports, comments, praise, and criticism should be e-mailed to
richards@cita.utoronto.ca.  Enjoy!

$Id: ANNOUNCE,v 1.1 1996/05/04 20:22:01 richards Exp $
