Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System

Ken Evans <[email protected]> · Wed, 3 Dec 1997 16:56:52 -0600

     MEDM 2.3.3 is now available.  This version has been in use for
operations at the Advanced Photon Source for over a month with no
reported problems.  Version 2.3 has been significantly modified from
the last publicly released version, which was 2.2.9.  A fair amount of
the internal logic has been changed to be clearer and more object
oriented.  This effort was started by Fred Vong and finished by
myself.  In addition, there are many new features, especially in EDIT
mode, and a number of bug fixes.  This version should be considerably
more stable and user-friendly in EDIT mode.  It was already stable in
EXECUTE mode.  A summary of new features is given below, along with
the location of the reference manual and how it may be obtained.

Version 2.3
===========

- - Help is now functional.  Help from the menus and context sensitive
  help uses Netscape.  Bubble help has been added to the Object Palette
  to identify the objects.

- - There is a greatly expanded MEDM reference manual in both hardcopy
  and HTML versions.

- - There is an Undo.

- - New editing operations through both the mouse and the keyboard have
  been added.  You can now select objects that are under other objects
  and can resize with Ctrl-Arrow keys.

- - An optional grid has been added for editing.  It can be toggled on
  and off for each display, and the spacing is adjustable.  Snap to grid
  has been implemented.

- - Undo, Align, Space Evenly, Center, Orient, Size, Grid, Find Outliers,
  Refresh, and Edit Summary have been added to the Edit menu.

- - You can now change the foreground and background colors
  simultaneously for all grouped elements.

- - There is a new PV Info feature, which has been popular.

- - There is a new configurable Execute Menu item on the Execute-Mode
  Popup Menu.

- - A display list is available from the Execute-mode popup menu.

- - A number of modifications have been made to the Related Display
  including executing it without showing the menu if there is only one
  item, the ability to replace the parent display, the ability to have
  labels rather than the overlapping squares on the menu button, and the
  ability to have a hidden button.

- - The Cartesian Plot has a time format for the x axis, and there are
  several new user interactions, such as zoom, in EXECUTE mode.  These
  require XRT/graph Version 3.

- - Shell commands, as well as commands on the Execute Menu, now accept
  special characters to include a process variable, include the name of
  the ADL file, or to prompt for user input.

- - The MEDM main window, object palette, resource palette, and color
  palette now have fixed, default locations.  You can change these
  locations with resources.

- - The way in which MEDM starts up and connects to an existing MEDM has
  been made more robust. There should be minimal need to use -cleanup. 

- - You no longer have to respond to the "Do you really want to Exit?"
  dialog box.  MEDM will still prompt you to save any unsaved files,
  however.

     See the reference manual for a more detailed description.  It is
available in HTML and Postscript at:

http://www.aps.anl.gov/asd/controls/epics/EpicsDocumentation/WWWPages/EpicsDoc.html


     Statically-linked versions that have been authorized for
XRT/graph are available as MEDM2_3_3.gz for both Solaris and Sun4 from
the EPICS Software Distribution page.  See Bakul Banerjee
([email protected]) for more information.  The EPICS Software
Distribution page, which requires a password, is located at:

http://www.aps.anl.gov/xfd/WWW/xfd/SoftDist/Distribution/platform_epics.html

     Finally, there seems to be a popular conception that MEDM is
slower than DM.  Informal testing, however, has indicated that their
runtime performance is very similar.  Older versions of MEDM were
noticeably slower to start up with very large (over 1 MB) ADL files.
This version has not been tested against DM with those files.  Both
programs will continue to be developed, and an attempt will be made to
keep their features consistent.  It should be noted that the version
of MEDM released by DESY is not part of this MEDM distribution
sequence.

     -Ken

Experimental Physics and Industrial Control System

Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System