Geoff,
I'm a bit surprised to hear that. I checked again and MaximDL has been stuck on version 5.24 for as long as I can remember. Maxim doesn't date its release notes so no way to tell when that last one came out but it was some time ago, though possibly in the last year (but if so certainly its been over 6 months at a minimum, and I am betting a lot longer than that). Every week I check for updates on all my astronomy software and in the course of a month almost every package has some form of update or enhancement but as I said before, I simply cannot remember the last time I got anything other than the page telling me that my version 5.24 is up to date. That either means all the other packages are seriously flawed and MaximDL is perfect, or all the others are still making an effort to address issues and add improvements and MaximDL is resting on its former glory.
And others seem to be fixing MaximDL issues even when MaximDL ignores them. Just a little while back, I started to get strange new artifacts with MaximDL captures in the form of blacked out regions in saturated stars. And the problem wasn't showing up just in PI, but also happened when I took those images into Nebulosity or CCDStack 2.0 to test them. Then, several weeks ago, CCDStack put out an update that fixed the problem, at least there. Still happens in PI and Nebulosity. So now I need to take my images into CCDStack and convert them before I import them into PI for processing. Now its likely that this is just a glitch in how my system works, but why was CCDStack aware of it and willing to add a fix, but MaximDL seems to be ignoring it.
Its this kind of constant upset and MaximDL's seeming lack of interest that has finally caused me to throw up my hands, which is a damned shame since its great capture software and works seemlessly with both my Hendricks Focuser on my Planewave CDK12.5 and with PEMPro 2 which I use to perfect my polar alignment in the field. So I will keep using it for setup but then abandon it when I start capturing lights (hint, hint, if SGPro is listening and can add support for both of those packages, I will abandon MaximDL altogether, and happily pay for the add-on).
My bet is that MaximDL has stopped supporting Version 5 because a new Version 6 is under development, but that is just a guess. Whatever the reason, I am done being frustrated when the developer does not seem to care.
Again, sorry for the rant, but this is a nitch hobby and we non-programmers rely heavily on the developers to keep things working and moving forward (just look at the progress PI has made since MaximDL issued even a minor update). Its the ones who are making that effort that I want to support, hence my switch to SGPro. From everything I have seen, that developer is interested in making his product the best possible and he is giving it his active attention and support and as such I expect to stay his loyal customer.
Jim
