ANN: VisPy 0.8.0 released

[dho...@gmail.com]

Hi all,

I'm happy to announce that VisPy 0.8.0 has been released! This is a pretty big release in my opinion as a maintainer. Here are the highlights:

1. "ipynb_webgl" has been deprecated and removed. There is no more vispy-specific Notebook widget (see jupyter_rfb below for its replacement).

2. New "jupyter_rfb" backend (requires "jupyter_rfb" package be installed) for producing inline visualizations in Jupyter notebooks. This backend does all of the rendering on the server-side so it is not limited to WebGL functionality like the old "ipynb_webgl" backend.

3. Website gallery has been ported to use sphinx-gallery to automatically show code, screenshots, and animations. Check it out here: https://vispy.org/gallery/index.html. Note that not all examples have been moved over to be shown on these pages, but are still available in the vispy github repository.

4. The ability to render planes of a volume has been added (thanks to Alister Burt): https://vispy.org/gallery/scene/volume_plane.html#sphx-glr-gallery-scene-volume-plane-py

5. The ability to clip the rendering of a volume by planes has been added (thanks to Lorenzo Gaifas): https://vispy.org/gallery/scene/volume_clipping.html#sphx-glr-gallery-scene-volume-clipping-py

6. New PyQt6 support (thanks to Marius Stanciu). PySide6 support was added in VisPy 0.7.

7. Various fixes and refactorings. Check out the release notes linked below for more details.

Thanks to all the contributors on this release, especially the new ones. Your help is greatly appreciated.

What is VisPy?
--------------

VisPy is a Python library for interactive scientific visualization that is designed to be fast, scalable, and easy to use. VisPy leverages the computational power of modern Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) through the OpenGL library to display very large datasets. Applications of VisPy include:

High-quality interactive scientific plots with millions of points.
Direct visualization of real-time data.
Fast interactive visualization of 3D models (meshes, volume rendering).
OpenGL visualization demos.
Scientific GUIs with fast, scalable visualization widgets (Qt or IPython notebook with WebGL).

See the Gallery and many other example scripts on the VisPy website (http://vispy.org/).

Upgrading
---------

VisPy supports Python 3.x on Linux, Mac OSX, and Windows. VisPy's heavy use of the GPU means that users will need to have modern and up-to-date video drivers for their system. VisPy can use one of many backends, see the documentation for details. We strive to keep backwards compatibility with older versions of VisPy, but interfaces are still being designed to best serve our users. As such, some things may have changed that break your existing usage. See the Release Notes (linked below) for more information on what has changed and contact the VisPy developers for help with any problems you run into.

Links
-----

GitHub: https://github.com/vispy/vispy
Website: http://vispy.org/
Gitter (for chat): https://gitter.im/vispy/vispy
Mailing list: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/vispy
Release Notes: https://github.com/vispy/vispy/blob/main/CHANGELOG.md

Contributing
------------

Help is always welcome. See our Contributor's Guide for information on how you can participate:

https://vispy.org/dev_guide/contributor_guide.html

Thanks,
Dave