Gigawiz have just announced the release of an updated version of Aabel.

Aabel™ NG is the result of a 5-year special project and massive development effort, rewriting millions lines of code to transform the Gigawiz flagship product into an icon of power and simplicity for professional users.

The update includes:

• Modernization and optimization of the main processing code
• A total redesign of the user interface, adding power with modeless simplicity
• Complete Carbon (32-bit)-to-Cocoa (64-bit) transformation
• Minimizing overhead between the user interface and the main processing code (a crucial step for sustainability and future development)
• Replacement of high-level Cocoa classes with Aabel NG-specific code, a key alteration for any part of the application that requires high performance with large data sets
• Addition of numerous new features

The transformation to 64-bit should enable much larger data sets to be handled, and there are a host of new statistical methods however I’m not familiar enough with the area to comment on how useful they are.

Interactive graphing means that you no longer have to manually update a plot to see how the changes look, the enhanced exploratory analytics could be really useful when working with large data-sets.

A Mac OS X Mavericks; Intel- based Mac and a colour monitor with a minimum resolution of 1440 x 900 is required. There are also a couple of issues with backward compatibility.

Aabel v3/v2 are 32-bit applications; Aabel NG (v4) is 64-bit and hence cannot use Apple data structures and formats that have not been ported to 64-bit. In summary, the implications are as follows: A feature of Aabel v3/v2, called database metaphor (i.e., a container that refers to a collection of worksheets), due to its dependency on Apple 32-bit subsystems, is not available in the 64-bit version. While Aabel NG (v4) reads the worksheet files of Aabel v3/v2, it will NOT be able to read their viewer files, because the latter files have contents that require Apple 32-bit subsystems (which are unavailable in 64-bit). In Aabel v3/v2, the System Alias Manager manages the connections between the graphs and their source worksheets. The Alias Manager has unresolved issues making the continuation of its use not sustainable. In Aabel NG (v4), the saved graphs will be hot-linked to their source worksheets along paths defined at the time their pipelines are created.

The price of the new version is $1250 (academic $750) and there are reduced pricing for upgrades.

I’m using Aabel 3 at the moment and I’m very happy with it, I’d be very interested to hear from anyone who upgrades.

Aabel v3.0.6 complimentary update is optimized for the newest Mac OS X version, Lion. In addition to optimizing Aabel v3 for Lion, this update also includes fixes for all known bugs and glitches that have been discovered up-to-date. The performance of Aabel v3 has been enhanced on Lion; this is in particular noticeable on machines with modern graphic cards. The updater that is downloaded from this page can be used on both Snow Leopard and Lion, but the performance-related enhanced aspects of the application are Lion-specific.

There is a comprehensive list of data analysis packages that run under Mac OSX here