ANN: glue v0.8

[Thomas Robitaille]

Hi everyone,

We are happy to announce the release of glue v0.8, along with
glue-vispy-viewers v0.4, which adds experimental 3D viewers (powered
by VisPy) to glue.

### About glue

Glue is a Python library to explore relationships within and among
related datasets. Its main features include:

* Linked Statistical Graphics: with glue, users can create scatter
plots, histograms, images, and now 3D representations of their data,
as well as create their own custom viewers. Glue is focused on the
brushing and linking paradigm, where selections in any graph propagate
to all others.

* Flexible linking across data: glue uses the logical links that exist
between different data sets to overlay visualizations of different
data, and to propagate selections across data sets. These links are
specified by the user, and are arbitrarily flexible.

* Full scripting capability: glue is written in Python, and built on
top of its standard scientific libraries (i.e., Numpy, Pandas,
Matplotlib, Scipy and others). Users can easily integrate their own
python code for data input, cleaning, and analysis.

For a 2-minute preview of glue, you can watch the following video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qO3RQiRjWA4

Find out more about glue at http://www.glueviz.org!

### Changes in glue v0.8

An overview of the main changes in this release is available here:

http://glueviz.org/en/stable/whatsnew/0.8.html#whatsnew-08

These include:

* Playback controls for animating views of cube slices in the image viewer

* An improved window for creating new components, which allows math
and numpy functions to be used, and also includes on-the-fly syntax
validation

* The ability to more easily add data to existing glue sessions, for
example those started with the qglue function.

* A new preferences dialog, with new settings to control the
foreground/background color in viewers as well as the default color
and transparency for data.

* Improved feedback and bug report windows which now allow you to
provide your email address so that we can follow up any issues you may
be having

* The ability to use circular and polygonal regions to extract spectra
from cubes (this is mainly for astronomy users)

In addition, many bug fixes and small improvements have been made
since the v0.7 series of releases.

### Installing/updating glue (new instructions!)

You can find installation instructions at the following page:

http://glueviz.org/en/stable/installation.html

including information on using conda to install the latest version of glue.

### About glue-vispy-viewers

The glue-vispy-viewers package is a plugin that adds 3D viewers to
glue. You can find out more about this plugin here:

http://www.glueviz.org/en/stable/whatsnew/experimental_3d.html#experimental-3d

This includes both 3D scatter plots and volume renderings, and support
selections using a variety of region types. Please note that these
viewers are still experimental.

### Reporting issues/getting help

Please let us know if you run into any issues using the issue trackers
on GitHub:

https://github.com/glue-viz/glue/issues

https://github.com/glue-viz/glue-vispy-viewers/issues

You can also join the glue-viz mailing list to have any discussions
related to glue and/or get help:

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/glue-viz

### Getting involved

Interested in contributing new features or helping maintain glue or
the 3D viewers? Please let me know (by replying off-list to this
email), and I can help you get started!

Thanks to everyone who contributed to these releases! (including Penny
Qian, Robin Wilson, Pey-Lian Lim, and Brett Morris)

Thanks,
Tom