Monthly Archives: April 2016

oaCapture 0.9.0 release

Well, it’s been a very long time coming… Sometimes life has other plans.

Partly this is because I have been waiting, waiting and waiting some more for Apple to release an update for El Capitan which fixed some of the problems introduced by the re-write of the USB layer in OSX 10.11. The latest release (10.11.4) appears to have massively increased the stability of the USB layer. If you want to try El Capitan then you probably need to have patched to at least that release.

Otherwise, what have we got? The main reasons for releasing now are to include the latest ASI SDK with support for all the new cameras and to provide improved support for El Capitan which has been a problem until now. There are also various bugfixes, lots of tidying up, some development work which is not yet complete, an update to the included libusb code (required for support on El Capitan), improvements to TIFF and FITS handling. I believe the OSX binaries should once again run on all versions from Snow Leopard on.

Testing has now expanded to fill an inordinate amount of time compared to coding. I’m going to have to do something to change that. For this release I’ve dropped the 32-bit builds (though I can do these on demand if required). I’ve also dropped builds for older Linux releases (same applies). I need to do a little work to get a Raspbian build to complete as well, so no binaries are currently available for that. I don’t think it’s much work, so I can prioritise that if people are clamouring for it.

Going forward I think I’m going to arbitrarily designate a release as 1.0.0 fairly soon. At that point I’ll be looking to put all the code in a public repository, preferably with some sort of bug-tracker, and make a “release candidate” distribution before each major update so hopefully others can join in with the thrill of testing 🙂