We are happy to tell you that we have just released Disco 3.0.

Disco 3.0 updates the Disco platform across the board, and it also brings our first fully native release for Apple Silicon Macs – so, especially if you own one of these machines, we recommend that you update at your earliest convenience. This update improves the general performance and stability of Disco, and it fixes a number of bugs and annoyances.

Keep sending us your feedback, ideas, and bug reports, and as always, a big thanks for using Disco!

Performance

This version of Disco improves performance across the board. There is almost no part of Disco that we could not make just a little bit faster, if you can believe it.

And even those parts left untouched work better now, thanks to a comprehensive update of our platform. Most notably, this version of Disco marks our transition to Java 17, which fixes a number of problems and greatly improves performance and responsiveness.

To make sure you can take full advantage of these platform improvements, we recommend that you download and install this update manually.

Apple Silicon

This is the first release of Disco to provide fully native support for the Apple Silicon platform.

When Apple announced their switch to a proprietary, arm64-based processor architecture, they provided the Rosetta 2 translation layer. This allowed applications built for their (now-legacy) Intel platform to keep working well, but of course even a great translation cannot fully match native performance.

With this release, all components of Disco can now be used without Rosetta, which allows Disco 3.0 to use the full native performance provided by the M1 processors. If you have a newer Mac with an M1 processor (or later), you should download and install Disco 3.0 for Apple Silicon manually to get the best performance and user experience.

→ Get Disco 3.0 for Apple Silicon here!

Security

We would like to thank all of you who approached us following the recent disclosure of security vulnerabilities in the log4 library (cf. CVE-2021-44228 and CVE-2021-45046). Fortunately, no version of Disco has been affected by this vulnerability.

We monitor relevant security announcements and check our software stack for known vulnerabilities regularly, and we could confirm that Disco is not affected shortly after publication. However, if you think there is some important news that has not crossed our radar, or you have found a vulnerability in our software, please let us know at security@fluxicon.com anytime.

Like most software, Disco is built on top of many open source libraries we depend on. We regularly update these dependencies along with Disco itself, and these updates frequently contain security fixes. If you are concerned about software security, you should make sure to install updates as soon as you can.

How to update

Disco will automatically download and install this update the next time you run it, if you are connected to the internet.

If you prefer to install this update of Disco manually, you can download and run the updated installer packages from fluxicon.com/disco/download

Changes

• Process Map:
  • Adjust user interface more gracefully for very small screens.
  • Mining very large and complex data sets is now more responsive.
  • Increased performance and stability of graph layout.
• Animation: Better support partial exporting of very large animations.
• CSV Import: Improved performance and stability.
• Excel Import:
  • Improved general reliability.
  • Fixed a problem with reading XLSX documents.
  • Gracefully handle even more unconventional documents.
• Airlift:
  • Smoother user experience when browsing and downloading large and complex data sets.
  • Improved import performance and stability.
• Log Export: Exporting very large data sets is now faster and more responsive.
• TimeWarp: Updated bank holidays calendars.
• Control Center: Extended support for Apple Silicon platform.
• Connection: Increased security and reliability.
• Platform:
  • Native support for Apple Silicon platform (Requires manual installation).
  • Java update (Requires manual installation).

Christian W. Günther

Product, development, and everything else

• christian@fluxicon.com
• christianwguenther
• @cwg

Christian creates software which is easy to use, performs great, and is easy on the eyes. He also handles most things design or AV around Fluxicon.