ENVI 5.6.1 and IDL 8.8.1 Released

[Brian G]

Hopefully by now everyone has received the email about the new versions of IDL and ENVI being released.  As detailed in the release notes, here are some of the new features:

ENVI 5.6.1

• New sensor formats:
  • Analysis Ready Data (ARD) from Maxar
  • PlanetScope PS2.SD and PSB.SD
  • Pleiades-NEO
  • Sentinel-3 Level-2 aerosol optical depth from Sea and Land Surface Temprerature Radiometer
• Cloud Optimized GeoTIFF read from HTTP/S3 and export to local file
  
• OGC WFS and WMTS support
  
• Improved SkySat support
• Improved Landsat support
• ENVI Server improvements for background processing
• Faster read of ENVI format raster
• Faster read of NITF/MIE4NITF files
• New NITF Dataset Browser
• Fill patterns for annotations
• ArcGIS Online image layer support
• Custom ENVI plot functions
• New annotation API
• New ENVINITF API

IDL 8.8.1

• Faster List and Hash/OrderedHash/Dictionary classes
• Faster FFT using MKL
• QUERY_PNG returns more metadata
• HDF5 read support for UTF-8 encoded string data
• H5D_READ performance improvements on large datasets
• Faster JSON_PARSE
• DIALOG_PICKFILE updated to new user interface on Windows
• Macintosh M1 support

A couple caveats are necessary:

  While IDL has tested well on the M1 Macintosh systems, there can be some issues with IDL Workbench.  There is a known issue with the AdoptOpenJDK 11 JRE on M1 systems, so the best fix is to replace that JRE with the Azul Zulu JRE.  This will be resolved in the next release when we move to Java 17, which does not have these issues.

  The port of the List and Hash classes into idl.dll has given us some large performance improvements.  But if you have save files from IDL 8.8 or older that contain any List or Hash class methods, then restoring those save files will override the new implementation.  This can destabilize your IDL runtime.  To address this, a new SAVEFILE_CLEANUP procedure was created, which will scan a given save file and remove any of these deprecated PRO code methods.  The next release will change the runtime, so that any routines that are compiled/restored from PRO/SAV files will not supersede routines of the same name from idl.dll or DLMs.  The /SKIP_EXISTING keyword on RESTORE, IDL_SAVEFILE::RESTORE, and RESOLVE_ROUTINE will also prevent those routines from even being compiled/restored when they have the same name as any method from idl.dll or DLMs.

Brian J Griglak

IDL Technical Lead

L3Harris Geospatial Solutions

[fawltyl...@gmail.com]

Using IDL still shows IDL 8.8 only.

[Brian G]

The Doc Center (https://www.l3harrisgeospatial.com/docs/home.html) has finally been updated, and shows the latest content.  Sorry for the delay, I'm not entirely sure I understand what took so long.

As a backup, the local help can be installed will always be the latest version.