**June 27, 2015**
Since the last release we closed over 34 issues and have made 380
commits mostly focused on fixing bugs, cleaning up the API and working
extensively on the plotting and rendering system to ensure HoloViews is
fully backend independent.
We'd again like to thank our growing user base for all their input,
which has helped us in making the API more understandable and fixing a
number of important bugs.
Highlights/Features:
- Allowed display of data structures which do not match the
recommended nesting hierarchy (67b28f3, fbd89c3).
- Dimensions now sanitized for `.select`, `.sample` and `.reduce`
calls (6685633, 00b5a66).
- Added `holoviews.ipython.display` function to render (and display)
any HoloViews object, useful for IPython interact widgets (0fa49cd).
- Table column widths now adapt to cell contents (be90a54).
- Defaulting to Matplotlib ticking behavior (62e1e58).
- Allowed specifying fixed figure sizes to Matplotlib via `fig_inches`
tuples using (width, None) and (None, height) formats (632facd).
- Constructors of `Chart`, `Path` and `Histogram` classes now support
additional data formats (2297375).
- `ScrubberWidget` now supports all figure formats (c317db4).
- Allowed customizing legend positions on `Bars` Elements (5a12882).
- Support for multiple colorbars on one axis (aac7b92).
- `.reindex` on `NdElement` types now support converting between key
and value dimensions allowing more powerful conversions. (03ac3ce)
- Improved support for casting between `Element` types (cdaab4e,
b2ad91b, ce7fe2d, 865b4d5).
- The `%%opts` cell magic may now be used multiple times in the same
cell (2a77fd0)
- Matplotlib rcParams can now be set correctly per figure (751210f).
- Improved `OptionTree` repr which now works with eval (2f824c1).
- Refactor of rendering system and IPython extension to allow easy
swapping of plotting backend (\141)
- Large plotting optimization by computing tight `bbox_inches`
once (e34e339).
- Widgets now cache frames in the DOM, avoiding flickering in some
browsers and make use of jinja2 template inheritance. (fc7dd2b)
- Calling a HoloViews object without arguments now clears any
associated custom styles. (9e8c343)
API Changes
- Renamed key_dimensions and value_dimensions to kdims and vdims
respectively, while providing backward compatibility for passing and
accessing the long names (8feb7d2).
- Combined x/y/zticker plot options into x/y/zticks parameters which
now accept an explicit number of ticks, an explicit list of tick
positions (and labels), and a Matplotlib tick locator.
- Changed backend options in %output magic, `nbagg` and `d3` are now
modes of the Matplotlib backend and can be selected with
`backend='matplotlib:nbagg'` and
`backend='matplotlib:mpld3'` respectively. The 'd3' and 'nbagg'
options remain supported but will be deprecated in future.
- Customizations should no longer be applied directly to
`Store.options`; the `Store.options(backend='matplotlib')` object
should be customized instead. There is no longer a need to call the
deprecated `Store.register_plots` method.