Another pair of hands makes us much more productive as a team.
STEM 7.3c was released at the start of August 2013.
The subsequent three months have spanned the holiday season in the UK, preparation
for and delivery of our annual STEM User Group Meeting,
and the interview process which led to us hiring our new Graduate Developer, Tomas
CHRIEN.
In spite of these other calls on our time, we have continued to respond to and fix
minor irritations in the software (which have been patched to individual, affected
customers) and to make a number of incremental enhancements to existing features.
There is no single compelling issue which warrants an update,
but there is much to be gained from everyone adopting a common system which includes
all these fixes. Most obviously it ensures consistency and reduces the risk
of anyone else being compromised by any of these issues going forward; more subtly
it saves time and avoids frustration if someone with one of the existing patches
has to re-install everything on a new machine.
So we have produced a STEM 7.3d maintenance release
which is now available as a ‘recommended update’ for all current STEM
users. 20 minor improvements and corrections are listed in the
release notes, with some highlights as follows:
- a
Report Configuration section has been added to the
Create Web Interface dialogs in the Editor and Results programs in order
to make these settings persistent between exports
- embedded notes are
now included when you copy an entire element, and individual field
notes are copied in the specific context of the Web
Presentation dialog
- the latest exception-handling
code resolves an issue specific to Windows 8 which repeatedly caused a graph of
Operating Profit Margin for a collection of services
to crash during the interactive workshop at
the recent STEM User Group Meeting
- the Editor will now
display errors or warnings relating to a web export
as it would run-time errors and warnings, and the next/previous error buttons will
allow you to step through such messages in your own time
- a couple of longstanding and very localised memory leaks have been fixed which
solves a problem of Excel slowing down when loading results of a model which has cost breakdown enabled.
As you would expect (and except where directly notified to the contrary due to ongoing
investigation), STEM 7.3d includes all patches
issued since the original STEM 7.3 and subsequent
7.3a, 7.3b and 7.3c
maintenance releases.
Note: for compatibility with any future patches, it is essential
to replace any previous patches or provisional release candidates with this official
STEM version 7.3d.
This should be the last 7.3 maintenance release. A major new STEM version
7.4 is planned for release early in 2014 as described at the recent
STEM User Group Meeting.