One of the biggest changes this release is behind the scenes – the folders SOFA Statistics is stored in have changed from “sofa” to “sofastats” to make them more distinct (there are other sofa programs ;-)). This was something important to get done before the version 1.0 release. Although this is a good change for the long-term it means users upgrading from 0.9.24 and below will need to rename their /home/username/sofa folder to /home/username/sofastats if they wish to work with old data or settings. For Ubuntu users, it is also important to manually uninstall previous versions of SOFA first so that “sofastats” can overwrite the application icon put there originally by “sofa”.
More noticeable, is the change to version upgrade checking. Auto-checking for any version upgrades is now the default. The goal is to help users stay up-to-date with bug fixes, improvements etc. Users can disable this feature by selecting the “No checking” option, or only auto-check for major upgrades. This feature only reads the contents of a small text file on the sofastatistics.com domain containing the latest version number.
Other changes include:
- SOFA suggests names more likely to be valid when user selects a file for importing.
- Can now import csv files with a txt extension.
- MySQL and PostgreSQL can now accept blank passwords.
- Better message for user if comtypes problem.
- Windows and Mac versions will no longer accept being launched with Python 2.7 and will give useful messages about fixing the problem. For Windows, the importance of installing the site-packages to python26 rather than python27 is explained.
- Mac version uses new, easier-to-install library to connect to MySQL databases.
The main series of bug fixes relate to recoding data and making new data tables or redesigning them.
- Fixed numerous recode bugs – mostly to do with application of recoded value labels.
- Fixed bug when making a new table with an existing name. Now stays open to give user choice as to what to do next e.g. change table name.
- Fixed misc bugs when deleting/adding/renaming tables while a database other than the default SOFA database is selected.
- Fixed bug running frequency table using MySQL where the category items are long integers.
- Fixed bug where Data List report selected and then the database is changed.
Ideally, the next release should be version 1.0.0