Sunday, May 24, 2009

Promethease 0.1.66 is out

As always there are many improvements since the last blog post, but these standout.

There is a new syntax for genosets. Older clients don't know how to read this, and will not be able to see these genosets. This is a good reason for you to upgrade to the latest version.

Since 0.1.50 it has been possible to pay $2 via Amazon.com and reduce the runtime to about 5 minutes. In doing so you're downloading a single compressed cachefile instead of making thousands of requests for individual pages. At the moment this cache file is updated approximately weekly, however in the future we expect to have this updated in realtime as the wiki is edited. There will be a new blog post when that works. Until then the $2 version is faster, but the free version uses slightly fresher data.

The upper right corner has a new button labeled 'Wizard'. Press this to use a simpler UI which walks you through setting up your run. If you pay the $2, not only will you get the cachefile for a faster run, but you'll also have access to 2 new features with this wizard. The first is the ability to only show pages which have been modified recently. This might be useful if you ran your report 2 months ago, and want to make a new report which only shows what is new since then.

The wizard also enables a highly experimental new kind of report. This report is based on loading multiple genotype files and predicting what is possible in the offspring. You might wish to use this if you have data for you and your spouse, and you'd like to see some possible genotypes in your children. Its really not quite ready for the general public, but it never will be unless it is released for wider testing. Most folks should just click 'Next' and move on to generate a traditional report.