A big month, but almost entirely for Spectral Workbench -- skip to the bottom to see those changes! And we're a few days late on this update, so apologies!

But a quick roundup of our other projects first:

New "Easy Installation"

Following up on a tip from a member of Parts & Crafts who has contributed to Public Lab in the past, we posted simple build instructions for both Spectral Workbench and plots2 for the Cloud9 service, which makes it crazy easy to get a copy of the code up and running in a free Cloud9 server, in your browser, from any computer, with no downloads or anything. It's now a ~5 minute procedure to get these running from scratch, from any computer!

This'll be useful at the...

Somerville, MA coding meetup

Which is tomorrow, at Parts & Crafts -- see the announcement here: http://publiclab.org/notes/warren/09-03-2015/public-lab-boston-somerville-coding-meetup-parts-crafts

And for anyone looking to get up and running quickly with PL code!

Open Pipe Kit

I submitted six new drivers, developed for the Open Air initiative, to Open Pipe Kit's drivers directory at http://packages.openpipekit.org/ - for Arduino-based sensors, and several dust sensors.

Leaflet.DistortableImage

We had a small but welcome change submitted to Leaflet.DistortableImage and some possible interest in tackling other bugs:

https://github.com/publiclab/Leaflet.DistortableImage/pull/55

MapKnitter

Very little activity on MapKnitter this month. We had 2 MapKnitter bugs moved to the Leaflet.DistortableImage tracker, and no other development work this month:

• https://github.com/publiclab/mapknitter/issues/196 glitch with scaling, rotating skewing 11 days ago
• https://github.com/publiclab/mapknitter/issues/136 image distortion/manipulation breaks when map corner points too close together 11 days ago

We did, however post a Cloud9 install script, as described above, although it needs testing:

• https://github.com/publiclab/mapknitter/issues/197 Cloud9 initialization -- needs testing 12 days ago

PublicLab.org

A variety of small changes were completed and issues posted on the plots2 codebase

The following new features were merged, and issues closed:

• https://github.com/publiclab/plots2/issues/316 link to store in header 4 days ago
• https://github.com/publiclab/plots2/issues/312 Cloud9 initialization 5 days ago
• https://github.com/publiclab/plots2/issues/311 adjusting images to be full-width for better display 13 days ago
• https://github.com/publiclab/plots2/issues/310 only detect subdomains in production mode 13 days ago
• https://github.com/publiclab/plots2/issues/306 blog tags on wiki pages 22 days ago
• https://github.com/publiclab/plots2/issues/304 Missing research note 28 days ago

Seven new issues were created:

• https://github.com/publiclab/plots2/issues/315 Research note main image crops unpredictably 7 days ago
• https://github.com/publiclab/plots2/issues/314 Consider upgrading etherpad to hackpad, which is now open source 9 days ago
• https://github.com/publiclab/plots2/issues/313 Create powertag for "This is part of a series on Xtopic" 11 days ago
• https://github.com/publiclab/plots2/issues/309 Banned user accounts still show as having liked things 15 days ago
• https://github.com/publiclab/plots2/issues/308 filter for users who have profile bio content 16 days ago
• https://github.com/publiclab/plots2/issues/307 update front page link to /wiki/nonprofit-initiatives instead of /initiatives 16 days ago
• https://github.com/publiclab/plots2/issues/305 Blog template and design improvements 22 days ago

Spectral Workbench

Spectral Workbench is where all the action is this month. I'm not even going to try to list it all here -- there were over 30 issues closed, and over 20 new issues opened. The bulk of Spectral Workbench 2.0 is rolled into this, with a massive redesign of the graphing library I've written about more than once. To see the full set of issues opened and closed, see this smaller merged pull request and for the big one, take a look at this huge one involving massive change over 52 different files, and 2,100 new lines of code:

https://github.com/publiclab/spectral-workbench/pull/174

For what it's worth, there are over 70 issues remaining open, although we may not tackle all of those in 2.0 -- some may wait for 2.1 or later. Thanks for your patience on this and we'll be announcing a beta soon!

There's also been a parallel project by @Sreyanth to implement a "Procedures" system so people can post, share, and follow each others' experimental procedures. An early version of this is being merged in shortly.

We're hoping to publish many of these changes in the next few days, so stay tuned!

Thanks again to our contributors, both coders and non-coders -- and if you know any coders who might like to get involved, point the at http://publiclab.org/wiki/developers!