In the last few weeks, Stellarium development has picked up a fair bit. Here are some screenshots for the curious. There'll no doubt be layout changes and style changes in the GUI before the release, but this might give some idea of what to expect.

	Stellarium 0.10.0 (SVN) with a couple of the new GUI elements visible
	The updated search dialog, now with tab selection of search results
	Updated light pollution simulation
	New configuration dialog

General Interface Changes

The 0.9.x release laid the ground work for moving more fully to QT by using it to provide the main application window, and using QT functions for some file IO and other infrastructural elements. Version 0.10.0 will come with a complete re-write of the GUI, using QT GUI widgets instead of the hand-made sgui system. It's a lot of work to do the change, but it means we can start to have more sophisticated GUI elements. Hopefully this will finally lay to rest the verey many requests to improve the usability of the GUI dialogs.

As part of th GUI re-working, the toolbars have been updates. There are now two toobars with buttons on - the original toolbar buttons are still available in a re-styles bar at the bottom of the screen, and a second toolbar has been added at the side, which contains controls for showing and hiding dialog boxes. Both toolbars scoot out of the way when the mouse cursor is not near them, giving the user a less cluttered view of the sky, leaving behind just the info bar.

The rendering of various sky elements has also been improved. The user has more control over how stars are rendered, providing for those who preferred the 0.8.x style rendering, and the more realistic rendering of 0.9.x. There are two controls now - star scale and relative star scale. The star scale will increase or decrease the size of all stars, whereas the relative scale is used to change how much more brightly bright stars are rendered. By increasing the relative stars scale, the user can restore the 0.8.x style rendering, which many people commented on losing with the 0.9.x versions.

The startup sequence has also been optimized, and the application should now be ready for use more quickly than in previous versions.

Search Dialog

The search dialog has been re-worked and now features tabbing to select different completions (the currently selected result is indicated in bold). The user just types in a few letters of the search term, and then tabs to select the appropriate result, pressing RETURN to move to that object. It's not a big departure from the older version of th dialog, but makes life a bit easier.

Light Pollution Simulation

The light pollution simulation feature has been re-written. The goal is to have it simulate the Bortle Dark Sky Scale. I think Fabien's still messing with the code, but for what it's worth the screenshot above show what it looks like in recent builds (composite image).

Configuration Dialog

There is a new configuration dialog, It's pretty ugly at the moment as we are struggling to give access to more configuration options, but without cluttering up the user interface. Many people have requested GUI access to settings currently only modifiable in the config.ini file, but we don't want to include everything else it'll end up looking like the openoffice configuration nightmare dialog from the 7th level of GUI design hell.

-Matthew

P.S. I love OpenOffice really.

Update: Varkhan1 from the forums made a win32 package of the development code, for those who want to have a play. Thanks Varkhan1!