Dear Fellow Mac users,

Very soon, KStars 3.0.0 will be released. In preparation for this release, it would be good if we could get feedback from Mac users on any issues or bugs that you might find. Linux users can get the current bleeding edge version with all the latest updates from git and Windows users can get the latest version using the daily builds from craft. But until we can get some major updates to craft, we can't get daily builds for Mac. I still have to build each one at home. I have written some recipes for craft and hope to get them up there in the near future so that we can get daily builds, but until that time, we will have to keep doing it the same way that I have been doing it for the last 2 years.

So in that vein, please check out the latest version and check out everything to see how its working. Please note that there is one issue in this build with the Serial Port Assistant that Jasem recently wrote because I built this dmg before he was done with it, so that just means it will pop up even when Stellarmate is not detected. He has fixed that issue, but it is not in this build. You can just click the check box to make it not come up all the time.

Some cool new things that you can check out include:
-A little addition that I have been working on for the FITSViewer called the FITSTools Panel, which is a slide out panel that includes statistics, a histogram, FITS Headers, and recent images.
-Improvements to the 3D Star Profile/3D graph view
-Some new INDI drivers including Altair, Toupcam and of course all of the other updates in the last couple of months.
-A complete rewrite of the Scheduler code by Eric (You can see those details in all their glory here: www.indilib.org/forum/ekos/4184-d16429-t...r-changes.html#32429)
-And much more!

If you find any issues or have any comments. please note them here in this forum so that we can take care of it.

Note that I do not recommend that you replace your current KStars 2.9.8.app with this beta version and then go out into an observing field where you cannot download the old version if you have to go back to it. . .yet . Test it out first to make sure you are having no issues.

indilib.org/jdownloads/kstars/kstars-3.0.0beta.dmg

Thanks,

Rob

At a first glance this beta version seems to work fine. I'll need to connect it to my gear and give it a try which I hopefully can do tonight. Meanwhile please see my comments in the scheduler rewrite thread...


Clear skies, Wouter

I connected my gear and the basic functions seem to work meaning slewing and taking images. I haven't been able to try guiding, plate solving etc yet since it is 10 AM here.

Also see the thread opened by me about the DSLR Image Viewer .


Wouter

It continues from version 2.98, but seems to be unable to read data of What's Interesting.

SkyWatcheer Alt-Az will crash the driver.

I have confirmed the above two points.

Downloading! I will have a try tonight since it seems to remain crystal-clear. I will report.

cheers
Niki

Thanks.
I will download, install and test it this week as I am at my observatory.

Rob, what's stopping us from having Mac nightly builds?
Let me know please what's going on and I'll see if I can find a solution.

The thing that is stopping us is that the nightly builds rely on craft to build. Craft will in fact make it better because it will rely on kde people to build it and not just us or homebrew folks. Also craft can work in a much more portable way because everything gets installed to a subfolder not /usr/local Also craft can build for previous versions of os x so we dont need to build on an old computer anymore. But craft is limited in scope right now and there are many packages that kstars needs that do not have recipes in craft yet and there are also a number of packages that currently do not build correctly on mac because craft was designed for windows first. I have tried a couple of times to fix the recipes that we need to work properly and write recipes for those things that dont have them yet. It does amount to about 40 recipes or so. What i really need is for people to try my recipes and help me fix them and then to get the craft folks to give feedback so we can get them put in place. Then once all that is done we would need to make sure it can bundle it all up properly to finish the dmg correctly. It is just a lot of work is the main issue, and I dont have infinite amounts of time. If you would like to try my recipes stefane, that might help.

I have never used Craft before, but I'm sure I can figure it out. Hook me up please with links etc...

I will send you an email with all the details and some attached files. Or maybe I will try putting them on GitHub. Either way, I'll do that later today.

Thanks,

Rob

Thanks, I won't be able to do anything on my laptop now but I'll look it up once I'm back home on my desktop machine.

Happy to report the Pegasus FocusCube now works just fine with version 3.0. (In version 2.9 it would not connect.) No temperature reading still but it does connect and autofocus much better than I could manually. In fact I ran through my entire setup sequence and am now taking pictures. On a nice note "capture and solve" then "slew to target" took 30 seconds per target. Three targets in 1.5 min. Wow
I finally got stellarmate to control my atlas mount over bluetooth as well as two zwo cameras and the pegasus focuser via usb all from my Macbook while sitting by a warm fire inside (how it was designed I think) -and everything works good and fast.
Thanks to everyone working to help those not so technical/code orientated.