[Mesquitelist] Mesquite 2.5 released

[Wayne Maddison]

Mesquite 2.5 has been released at http://mesquiteproject.org.

Most visible in this new version is a change in interface colors and 
design, but more important are:

-- There is a new Project Panel that helps you remember and use the 
objects (taxa, matrices, trees, etc.) in your project

-- Consensus trees are now built in (Strict, semistrict, majority rules)

-- There are new tools for manual sequence alignment; Mesquite now 
has all of the primary sequence alignment tools that are present in 
MacClade, as well as a few additional features.

-- Two new features handle calculations with multiple trees, Step 
Through Trees and Summarize State Changes Over Trees.  A new tree 
exporter enables you to read many trees from one file, transform 
them, and save them to a new tree file.

-- The Tree Window and Character Matrix Editor both have new "info 
panels" that provide a quick way to get information about the trees 
or matrix, edit footnotes, and (for categorical data) edit state 
names.

These and other new features are described here:

http://mesquiteproject.org/Mesquite_Folder/docs/mesquite/changes.html

There are many minor bug fixes and improvements, and a few 
substantive bug fixes.

Modules compatible with version 2.01 are not necessarily compatible 
with 2.5. Tuatara is compatible, and CoMET is probably compatible. 
The following packages have new versions, just released, that you 
will need to get if you wish to use them with Mesquite 2.5:

Cartographer -- http://mesquiteproject.org/packages/cartographer/
SILK -- http://mesquiteproject.org/packages/SILK/
Stratigraphic Tools/StratAdd -- 
http://mesquiteproject.org/packages/stratigraphicTools/

PDAP is incompatible, but a new version will come soon 
(http://mesquiteproject.org/pdap_mesquite/index.html).
TreeSetViz is incompatible.

Links to these packages are also available on the Mesquite home page.

The Headless version of Mesquite has not yet been updated to version 2.5.

As an aside, the Project Panel is another step in a series of 
improvements we are making so that Mesquite is easier to use. The 
first had been the search system to help you find features. With the 
Project Panel, you can more easily keep track of the data objects 
that belong to you.  Our next target is to improve the ease with 
which you can discover what calculations are available, and how to 
achieve them.

-- 
-------------------------------------------------------------------
Wayne Maddison                        David R. Maddison
Departments of Zoology and Botany     Department of Entomology
University of British Columbia        University of Arizona
Vancouver, BC   V6T 1Z4               Tucson, AZ   85721
email: wmaddisn at interchange.ubc.ca    email: beetle at ag.arizona.edu

Mesquite: http://mesquiteproject.org
MacClade: http://macclade.org
Tree of Life: http://tolweb.org