Personal use license and new features enhance visualization and analysis tool.

Research Systems Inc. (RSI), a wholly owned subsidiary of Eastman Kodak Company, announced that it is releasing IDL 5.6, the ideal data analysis, visualization and cross-application development software. The new version adds a host of new features that increase performance and flexibility, and offers the option of a Personal Use license.

The Personal Use License enables users to install and license IDL Software on up to four separate computer systems that share a common operating system.

Some of the new features available in IDL 5.6 include:

• New LAPACK linear algebra routines for more robust and accurate algorithms for solving systems of linear equations, eigensystems, singular value decomposition, and linear least-squares calculations
• Many notable user interface additions including true tab and hierarchical tree-view widgets, combo boxes (editable droplists), pop-up "tool tips" for buttons and draw widgets, and support for pushbuttons and toggle buttons
• New 64-bit support for IBM AIX, SGI IrixTM, and HP-UX for working with extremely large amounts of data
• Support for the Mac OS X platform
• New map projection routines that use the U.S.G.S. (U.S. Geological Survey) General Cartographic Transformation Package
• Read and query support for HDF5 and upgraded HDF4 and HDF-EOS libraries
• Support for importing data stored in XML (eXtensible Markup Language) format, a popular standard for sharing data across networks and on the Web
• A new stride syntax for array subscripts for simplified coding
• Many new file manipulation routines
• Much more...

The standard license of IDL Software is available for Windows 98/NT/2000/XP, Mac OS X, Linux and UNIX. The Personal Use License is available on Windows, Linux and Mac OS X.