Category "News"


Here’s the link to the recording of the Redefining Image Analysis with ENVI 6.0, IDL 9.0, and the ENVI Ecosystem webinar I attended awhile ago. The slides are also available for download.

IDL 9.0 was released recently[1]. Some notable new features:

  • Apple Silicon Mac support — most of my IDL use is from a terminal window on my Mac to a Linux, but occasionally I do some IDL development directly on my Mac. The improved speed is probably not a factor for me, but it is good to know NV5 is still going to support MacOS.
  • HttpRequest class — I have some routines that I use to make requests, but this should be a nice addition to the standard library.
  • IDL Extension for VS Code — I wrote about this already, but I missed the IDL native notebooks (not Jupyter notebooks). This looks very interesting, enough to install VSCode for a while to test them out.

There are a few more features, as well as updates and library updates. Details in What’s New in IDL 9.0.


  1. I learned about it today the “Redefining Image Analysis with ENVI 6.0, IDL 9.0, and the ENVI Ecosystem” webinar, but maybe it’s been out for awhile? ??

IDL 8.7.3 was released recently1. The new features are:

  1. Using the Intel Math Kernel Library (MKL) for matrix operations now. My experience has been that MKL is a highly optimized implementation of BLAS, a library of low-level matrix and vector operations. Matrix operations, such as the # and ##, should be faster now, but I don’t have 8.7.3 to test on, yet.
  2. New BLASS_GEMM matrix multiplication routine with many options for controlling the operation. This is a consequence of adding the MKL.
  3. New SOBOLSEQUENCE routine to generate numbers from the Sobel sequence.

UPDATE 2/25/2020: I have IDL 8.7.3 now and did some simple testing of the performance between IDL 8.7.3 and IDL 8.6 for # and ##. Mean time for multiplying two 50,000 by 50,000 element matrices went from 76.942 sec in IDL 8.6 down to 3.400 sec in IDL 8.7.3.


  1. I have no idea exactly when or how to find that out. ?

IDL 8.7.2 was released sometime last year1. Check out the What’s New for more details. The big feature is the WIDGET_BROWSER, which allows a browser window to be embedded in an IDL widget program.


  1. I only know because I saw a webinar for the IDL 8.7.3 release, so it must have been awhile ago. 

IDL 8.7 was released recently. The listed features are:

  • ROUTINE_DIR function that returns the directory for the file containing the calling routine
  • asynchronous job classes
  • a few miscellaneous other updates

The asynchronous job classes look interesting:

The IDLAsync classes allow you to specify units of work to execute asynchronously outside the main IDL session. To do this, create an IDLAsyncQueue and one or more IDLAsyncJob objects that encapsulate the work to be performed. As jobs are added to the queue, they will be executed at some point in the future as resources are available. When a job is complete, you can retrieve its results for further use. You can also construct an IDLAsyncJoin object and pass it into the jobs on creation. If you do this, you can wait on the join object for all of the jobs it observes to be finished before continuing.

Check the release notes for more details.

VISualize 2013, the annual IDL user group meeting, is planned for June 12-13 at the WWF headquarters in Washington, DC. Registration and call for abstracts are now open.

There will be an ENVI and IDL User Group organized by Exelis VIS at this year’s AGU:

At the event you will:

  • See what’s new in ENVI and IDL and what’s coming down the road
  • Learn how you can access ENVI and IDL functionality in the cloud
  • Share feedback with us over complimentary food and drinks

The event is Wednesday December 5 from 5:30 to 7:30 at Jillian’s San Francisco.

I will be presenting a poster right before the User Group meeting. Drop by if you are interested in using GPU’s, accelerating curve fitting in IDL, or something else. The poster is IN33A-1529, “GPU accelerated curve fitting with IDL” and will be in Moscone South on Wednesday December 5 from 1:40-6 pm (I won’t be there the whole time, will probably do my time at the beginning of the session). I also did some work with IN53C-1744, “A Python Geospatial Language Toolkit”, on Friday December 7 at 1:40-6 pm, but I will be gone by that time.

Exelis VIS will be at booth #916. Tech-X will not have a booth this year, I’m focusing my energy on posters and individual meetings. If you are interested in getting together to talk, let me know!

The IDL Online Help is now online! I can now finally link to the help page for CONGRID.

Third party libraries are also included in the “Documentation Center”. My personal library[1] is present, but the parsing of my routines used by the Doc Center doesn’t catch all the comments in the headers. I’m working on a release of IDLdoc that will produce Doc Center compatible output for the third party libraries that use IDLdoc.


  1. Although I have never really released a full version of my library. I’m trying to get a more complete version together—expect news on this soon. ??

IDL 8.2.1 has been released:

Last, an editorial. Though 8.2.1 includes bug fixes (52 CRs closed), we’re also adding several new features, so it feels like more than just a maintenance release. I think this is a result of us getting better at the “release early, release often” software philosophy.

I’m downloading now.

UPDATE: note to Mountain Lion users—the Mac installer is not signed, so Mountain Lion will refuse to install it if you haven’t changed your defaults. To do a one-time bypass of this, right-click (or control-click) on the installer to get the popup menu and select “Open”. That will give you an option to install anyway.

Looks like IDL 8.2.1 is ready:

IDL 8.2.1 will be released next Wednesday, October 3. It includes updates to, primarily, (New) Graphics, the widget toolkit and the Workbench. I’ll have a more detailed listing, along with a link to download a set of programmatic examples, in a post next week.

From the version number I’m guessing this will be mostly bug fixes, but Mark does mention the addition of Brewer color tables!

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