"To do" list

At Syzygy Research & Technology, we are deeply committed to our customers. Over the past few months, we have received a number of great suggestions for features to add to The Digital Universe. Suggestions such as these have already resulted in our updating the package from V1.00 to V1.02.

For registered owners of the software, minor updates will be made available in the support area of this Web site. As a registered owner, you will also be entitled to the next major update of the package for half of the regular price.

To get an idea of the kinds of improvements planned for The Digital Universe in the future, we thought that it might be a good idea to make our "To do" list available to anyone who's interested. If you can think of a feature that you would like to see which is not currently listed, feel free to contact us at support@syz.com. Similarly, if you think that any of the planned features below should receive priority, send us a note!

Of course, updates to the hypertext will always be continuing on an ongoing basis as new things are discovered. This section only outlines the proposed changes to the software itself.

"To Do"

In no particular order, here are some of the things which we would like to add to The Digital Universe. Some of the features will be considered minor updates (and hence available for free from this Web site), and some will be considered major updates (which will be available to registered owners for half price). Some may never be implemented at all, but you can't say that we never considered them! :-) If you've made a suggestion to us in the past which you don't see here, check with us in case it has gotten lost in the shuffle. In the meantime, keep the suggestions coming - it's the best way to ensure that The Digital Universe remains a powerful astronomical package for years to come!

Of course, this list (despite its size) is by no means exhaustive, and there are a lot of other great features that we have planned which are not covered here (actually, some of them are pretty exciting and we don't want our competition to steal our ideas before we've had a chance to implement them ourselves :-) Stay tuned for details!

Have an option for plotting a Telrad reticle.
Draw deep sky objects with different symbols depending on what type of object they are. Also, draw galaxies as an oval rather than a simple circle, oriented in the proper direction.
Add an ARexx interface so that scripts could be written to allow The Digital Universe to control computer-controlled telescopes.
Add a simple means for users to add their own text and descriptions to the hypertext database.
Add support for the Hubble Guide Star catalogue.
Distribute future versions on CDROM and disk, so that CDROM owners can have access to more pictures, audio samples, pre-generated animations, etc.
Add the ability for the user to define their own palette.
Off-Earth views are a must for a future version of DU. Unfortunately, this will be considered a major revision, and hence will not be available free to registered users (half price instead).
Add a legend for stellar magnitudes, appearing optionally on the screen and/or printer.
Implement some method whereby star trails don't smear out names and other labelling features.
Some of the numbers in the info window have a bunch of digits that would be more readable if separated by commas (of course, some users would prefer to see them separated by periods - this is a locale dependent issue).
Add a general purpose "event finder" (similar in concept to the report generator) that lets you find the next occurrences of occultations, eclipses, etc.
Give the user a bit more control in determining how bright objects should appear at various magnitudes.
Put the DU screen to the back when iconified by MUI.
Localization to other languages - at least French and German (this is a big job, since we do have an 800 page hypertext file, after all).
Allow landscape printing.
Display field of view, right ascension, declination, altitude, and/or azimuth of the center of field optionally on the screen.
Provide a mode whereby you could see, in real time, the right ascension and declination of the mouse pointer.
Display the ecliptic
Provide an option to just show the celestial equator, not RA/Dec grid
Display an outline of the Milky Way
Display orbital paths for planetary satellites
Get orbital information for interplanetary space probes and put in the appropriate formulae to deal with them.
Software should return to the original time after generating an animation.
Add the ability to save the complete status of the software (time, location, field, direction of field, settings, etc.) so that an event could be loaded back in.
Add a few "famous" observing sites to the city list.
Add ability to load previously saved display preferences. Currently, they are only loaded when the software starts up.
Implement a "key frame" based animation generator, whereby the user can generate more complex animations.
Allow the user to save animation frames as individual pictures, if desired.
Make Animation Control window default to adopting the same time advancement settings as those set in the Time Control Window.
Change "Save" to "Save as" in areas of the program where a requester is brought up.
Stop animation status window from activating itself while rendering an animation, so that other applications aren't interrupted while animating in the background.
Fix typo in duobjects.guide hypertext for Beta Pictoris - "It is believed than"
Only turn the audio filter back on if it was on already before playing the intro
Check into setting the stack size automatically.
In "Object Information" window, show when the object will next be visible, taking twilight into consideration.
Add "dawn" and "dusk" to the "advance by" gadgets, to advance to the next dawk or dusk moment. Add user's definition of twilight in terms of altitude of Sun below the horizon in the time advancement window.
Cache SAO star data in RAM if the user has enough.
Planetary satellite print rendering should be "fixed" so that magnitude blobs aren't drawn (true size disks drawn instead) if the parent planet is rendered full size.
Make "aborting an animation" close and finish it instead of delete it.
Implement a "Quick Look" in an upwards direction.
Make a "report generator"-like interface to let the user pick what should show up as info on the screen.
Add "direct telescope" button to info window to allow ARexx version to let a script know that the user wants to pan there.
Implement continuously updating positions in Info window.
Fix listview in time advancement section of Time Control window so that it resizes when the window is resized.
Implement asynchronous modifications during animation rendering.
Allow the user to define where they would like alt/az markings to appear (in the center, on the sides of the screen, etc.)
Provide user-definable Ra/dec markings similar to the alt/az markings (ie. a dynamic resolution dependant upon the zoom factor)
Implement "normal" looping in animations, rendering the first frame again as the last.
Highlight a "found" object in some manner.
Implement a special cylindrical or Mercator projection 360 degree view of the sky.
When terrestrial map is implemented, draw optional concentric circles around Earth-orbiting satellites showing the object's altitude.
Provide a special mode whereby plots of the motion of moving bodies against the fixed stellar background can be printed.
Fix report generation results for rise/set times of circumpolar or never visible objects.
Separate the deep sky object display button into one for NGC objects and one for Messier objects.
Data sets for Cederblad, Sharpless objects, etc.

Known bugs

Multiscan Productivity and Super72 screen modes do not show in the screen mode requester.
Minor enforcer hit in doing search of hypertext.
Field of View shortcut keys don't work when using French (or any non-American?) keyboard layout.

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