Software Release Notes 6.0

ANDATA is thrilled to disclose the ANDATA Fall Release 6.0! On top of significant performance improvements and minor fixes, our software tools now also exhibit a refreshed graphical user interface.

We seized the opportunity in MATLAB^®’s initiative to phase out Java-based legacy frameworks, to revamp the main graphical interface, as well as many supporting windows and dialogs of our tools Stipulator, Brainer and Mapper. Optimizing application responsiveness was the prime focus for our new GUI controller software. A significant improvement of the overall performance is noticeable in the Stipulator main GUI, particularly. Operations such as case selection, scrolling or column manipulation, run substantially faster than in previous versions. These updates are powered by App Designer/uifigure, MATLAB’s current framework for building native, maintainable and sustainable applications. This migration heavily contributes to our goal of Java-free software, which we already initialized in previous releases with focus on Expectator, Configurator, and other libraries. The latest MATLAB versions yield an even better performance in future releases due to enhancements in uifigure, addressing the increased latency when opening dialogs.

In addition to the performance improvements, we addressed several usability issues, resulting in an overall faster and smoother user experience.

Detailed instructions on the quickest and easiest way to receive the ANDATA Fall Release 6.0 can be found at How to Install ANDATA Software.

The most important updates of the ANDATA Fall Release 6.0 are highlighted in the following.

Stipulator

• Stipulator’s main graphical user interface has been rebuilt as a uifigure-based MATLAB application. Many supporting dialogs, such as Edit signal processing (Processings > Edit), Edit case (Cases > Edit > Modify) and several others, have been rebuilt as uifigure-based dialogs. A newly added interface component now displays important information, errors, warnings and log messages directly in the main Stipulator window.

• A new option for generating a sunburst plot is available under Analysis > Plot attributes > Sunburst. For details, see the “Sunburst” section in the “Plot attributes” chapter of the Stipulator User Guide.

• A new menu entry Cases > Select > By signals insourced allows to select all cases with insourced data in the current Stipulator project.

• The default value for the “If default channels are not found” setting in Signals > Find defaults… has been changed to “Keep current value”. Similarly, the default value for “If default attributes are not found” in Attributes > Find defaults… has been changed to “Keep current value”.

• (SI-366) Fixed an issue occurring when opening links with Attributes > Links > Open when perturbation steps were defined and the “Plot/export perturbations” option in Analysis > Preferences… was enabled.

• Fixed an issue in File > Export > Signals where exported files could unintentionally be overwritten or the entire export could fail if case names contained special characters.

• A background worker function that checks the consistency of case data structures has been optimized and now runs significantly faster. This improvement is especially noticeable in Stipulator projects with many cases and several thousand attributes.

• Signals > Find defaults… can now run in parallel if the Parallel Computing Toolbox™ is available.

• Parameter dependent extraction is no longer supported. Using filter function ssreparametrize in signal processing provides equivalent results.

Brainer

• Brainer’s main graphical user interface has been rebuilt as a uifigure-based MATLAB application. Almost all supporting dialogs have also been migrated to uifigure-based versions. A new interface component displays important information, errors, warnings and log messages directly in the main Brainer window.

• Additional methods and plots are supported for filter method based feature selection in Extras > Feature Selection > Filter method selection. For details, see the “Filter method selection” section in the “Feature selection” chapter of the Brainer User Guide.

Expectator

• The interactive dialogs used to calibrate expectations (“Calibrate selected expectation…” in Expectator’s main window), as well as the Edit processing dialog (shared with Stipulator) used to define or edit signal processing chains have been rebuilt as uifigure-based dialogs.

• Fixed an issue in Expectator where an error occurred in MATLAB R2024b if certain lists had no element selected.

General

• Mapper’s main graphical user interface has been rebuilt as a uifigure-based MATLAB application. Nearly all supporting dialogs have also been migrated to uifigure-based versions. A new interface component displays important information, errors, warnings and log messages directly in the main Mapper window.

• The list of recently opened files at the bottom of the File menu in all tools now preserves entries for files that are temporarily unavailable.

• Fixed a bug in Mapper where no map views could be saved from the Power Data Selector if no view had previously been saved in the Mapper project.

• (SI-373) Fixed an issue in helper function ss2dmAbscissa where certain MATLAB syntax was incompatible with the newer, not yet officially supported MATLAB version R2025b.