[ANN] IPython 0.12 is out!

[Fernando Perez]

Hi all,

on behalf of the IPython development team, I'm thrilled to announce, after 
an intense 4 1/2 months of work, the official release of IPython 0.12.

This is a very important release for IPython, for several reasons. First 
and foremost, we have a major new feature, our interactive web-based 
notebook, that has been in our sights for a very long time.  We tried to 
build one years ago (with WX) as a Google SoC project in 2005, had other 
prototypes later on, but things never quite worked.  Finally the 
refactoring effort started two years ago, the communications architecture 
we built in 2010, and the advances of modern browsers, gave us all the 
necessary pieces. 

With this foundation in place, while part of the team worked on the 0.11 
release, Brian Granger had already started quietly building the web 
notebook, which we demoed in early-alpha mode at the SciPy 2011 conference 
(http://www.archive.org/details/Wednesday-203-6-
IpythonANewArchitectureForInteractiveAndParallel).  By the EuroScipy 
conference in August we had merged Brian's amazing effort into our master 
branch, and after that multiple people (old and new) jumped in to make all 
kinds of improvements, leaving us today with something that is an 
excellent foundation.  It's still the first release of the notebook, and 
as such we know it has a number of rough edges, but several of us have 
been using it as a daily research tool for the last few months.  Do not 
hesitate to file issues for any problems you encounter with it, and we 
even have an 'open issue' for general discussion of ideas and features for 
the notebook at: https://github.com/ipython/ipython/issues/977.

Furthermore, it is clear that our big refactoring work, combined with the 
amazing facilities at Github, are paying off.  The 0.11 series was a major 
amount of work, with 511 issues closed over almost two years. But that 
pales in comparison to this cycle: in only 4 1/2 months we closed 515 
issues, with 50% being Pull Requests. And very importantly, our list of 
contributors includes many new faces (see the credits section in our 
release notes for full details), which is the best thing that can happen 
to an open source project.

We hope you will find the new features (the notebook isn't the only one! 
see below) compelling, and that many more will not only use IPython but 
will join the project; there's plenty to do and now there are tasks for 
many different skill sets (web, javascript, gui work, low-level 
networking, parallel machinery, console apps, etc).

*Downloads*

Download links and instructions are at: http://ipython.org/download.html
And IPython is also on PyPI: http://pypi.python.org/pypi/ipython

Those contain a built version of the HTML docs; if you want pure source 
downloads with no docs, those are available on github:

Tarball: https://github.com/ipython/ipython/tarball/rel-0.12
Zipball: https://github.com/ipython/ipython/zipball/rel-0.12


* Features *
Here is a quick listing of the major new features:

- An interactive browser-based Notebook with rich media support
- Two-process terminal console
- Tabbed QtConsole
- Full Python 3 compatibility
- Standalone Kernel
- PyPy support

And many more...

We closed over 500 tickets, merged over 200 pull requests, and more than 
45 people contributed commits for the final release. 

Please see our release notes for the full details on everything about this 
release:
http://ipython.org/ipython-doc/stable/whatsnew/version0.12.html

* IPython tutorial at PyCon 2012 *

Those of you attending (or planning on it) PyCon 2012 in Santa Clara, CA, 
may be interested in attending a hands-on tutorial we will be presenting 
on the many faces of IPython.  See https://us.pycon.org/2012/schedule/
presentation/121/ for full details.

* Errata *
This was caught by Matthias Bussionnier's (one of our great new 
contributors) sharp eyes while I was writing these release notes: In the 
example notebook called display_protocol, the first cell starts with:

from IPython.lib.pylabtools import print_figure

which should instead be:

from IPython.core.pylabtools import print_figure

This has already been fixed on master, but since the final 0.12 files have 
been uploaded to github and PyPI, we'll let them be.

As usual, if you find any other problem, please file a ticket --or even 
better, a pull request fixing it-- on our github issues site (https://
github.com/ipython/ipython/issues/).

Many thanks to all who contributed!

Fernando, on behalf of the IPython development team.

http://ipython.org