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Tracker 4.87

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Tracker 4.87 installers available
Douglas Brown Avatar
Douglas Brown
449 Posts

Hello Tracker users,

Tracker 4.87 installers for Windows, Mac and Linux are now available from both the Tracker home page (http://www.cabrillo.edu/~dbrown/tracker/) and ComPADRE (http://www.opensourcephysics.org/items/detail.cfm?ID=7365).

This release doesn't introduce many new features, but it is an important upgrade and I strongly urge you to (a) uninstall your current version and (b) install this new one from scratch.

There are 3 major changes in this release, all of which are designed to make both Tracker and Xuggle more robust and independent of the local machine environment. Together, they work so well that you can now install Tracker (with Xuggle) on a portable drive and as long as you have an appropriate Java VM on the host Tracker starts right up with a working video engine! (For more information, see http://www.cabrillo.edu/~dbrown/tracker/portable_tracker.html)

  1. Xuggle is now automatically installed inside the Tracker home directory so it is under Tracker's full control.
  2. Tracker creates its own environment when it launches so it no longer depends on the host computer's environment.
  3. Tracker now loads the Xuggle classes from it's own home directory rather than from the Java VM extensions directory on the host.

I know that for many of you this is too much information, but the bottom line is Tracker now works more reliably on all platforms. Of course that's a bold statement that just invites bugs, so if any of you have problems please report them to me ASAP ;-)  Thanks in advance!

best regards,

Doug


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