[Gretl-users] recent developments

[Allin Cottrell]

Hello all,

Here's an update on progress towards gretl 1.6.0.  Those of you 
who build gretl from CVS, or make a habit of downloading the 
latest Windows snapshot, may be aware of these things already, 
but...

* The reorganization and polishing of the GUI menus is now 
completed, so far as I am concerned.  If anyone has strenuous 
objections to the way things stand, please say so now.

* Also along the lines of GUI polish, I recently reorganized the 
buttons at the bottom of GUI windows, at least those that have 
"standard" buttons (with icons).  I'm afraid this may at 
first disorient people who were familiar with the old setup (me 
included!), but the pattern is consistent with Gnumeric, which I 
presume is in turn consistent with the Gnome Human Interface 
Guidelines.

In brief, the rightmost button is now the "normal completion of 
task" button, usually "OK" but sometimes "Close".  If a Help 
item is present, it's always the leftmost button.  In between 
are things like "Cancel" and "Apply".  Up till now, "OK" and 
"Cancel" have been inverted in gretl, relative to this scheme.

* Time series filters: We now have moving average (centered or 
not, as you prefer), exponential moving average, 
Hodrick-Prescott and Baxter-King available in the GUI for time 
series data, under /Variable/Filters.  This knocks off another 
"expert" item that was previously available only in command-line 
mode.  Thanks to Tadeusz Kufel for helpful suggestions on the
moving average option.

* The GUI apparatus for building, editing and opening function 
packages has been redesigned and, I think, improved.  However, 
it still has to be classed as "experimental".  I would like to 
get this working really well, because I think gretl's scripting 
capacity is now at the point where user-contributed functions 
can have a real impact.  But I'm resigned to the fact that this 
probably won't be finalized for 1.6.0.  It's complicated.

Allin.