New releases of TOPCAT and STILTS have been released:

TOPCAT v3.6
STILTS v2.2

You can find downloads and additional information at the usual places:

http://www.starlink.ac.uk/topcat/
http://www.starlink.ac.uk/stilts/

Significant upgrades are:

Session and Multi-Table save/load (TOPCAT):
From the Save Window, as well as the old behaviour of saving the
current table to a file, you now have two new options:
Save multiple tables to a single container file, or save the
TOPCAT session to a single container file.  These are similar,
but in the latter case subsets, hidden columns, sort orders etc
are saved as well as the table data itself.  When a file saved
in this way is loaded, all the tables will be loaded in.

Multi-table copy (STILTS):
There are new STILTS commands tmulti and tmultin which can copy
multiple input files to a single container output file
(typically multi-extension FITS or multi-TABLE VOTable).

System Browser (TOPCAT):
The TOPCAT load and save windows now have a new button “System Browser”
which can be used as an alternative to the old Filestore Browser
button.  It lets you use your platform’s native OS file browser,
which may give Mac and Windows users a more familiar and convenient
experience.

Rename/Delete Row Subsets (TOPCAT):
At long last, the Subset Window provides options for deleting and
renaming subsets.  Apologies to those who’ve been asking that this
has taken so long to implement.

JSAMP upgrade:
The JSAMP library used is now v1.1; amongst other things it means
that if you’re using Java 1.6 on a suitable desktop, a SAMP Hub
started from TOPCAT will show up as an icon in the “System Tray”.

There are a number of other minor enhancements and bugfixes as well.
For details see the respective version histories:

http://www.starlink.ac.uk/topcat/sun253/versions.html
http://www.starlink.ac.uk/stilts/sun256/versions.html

Finally, from this version, TOPCAT and STILTS require version 1.5 of the
Java Runtime Environment to run.

The following new releases were made on 25 March 2010:

TOPCAT v3.5-2

STILTS v2.1-2

Updates/improvements include:

• JyStilts: You can now invoke STILTS commands from Jython as an alternative to the Unix/DOS command line.  This seems to work well, but is somewhat experimental - feedback is encouraged.  See http://www.starlink.ac.uk/stilts/sun256/jystilts.html
• Crossmatching enhancements: Scalability and performance have been improved for the STILTS and TOPCAT crossmatching functions.  Quantitative differences depend on detailed requirements, but maximum table size increases of a factor of 5 and CPU time decreases of a factor of 3 are typical; ten million is now a ballpark figure for the number of rows you can match in a reasonable amount of memory. If you have crossmatching requirements which are still out of the scope of this software, please make contact through the TOPCAT web page

These releases also contain quite a number of smaller performance and functionality enhancements and bug fixes.  For details, see the full version histories: TOPCAT and STILTS.

The following new minor releases were made on 17 July 2009:

• TOPCAT v2.7-2
• STILTS v2.0-4
• STIL v3.4-2

These releases contain minor enhancements, updates and bug fixes. Detailed information about the changes can be found at:

• http://www.starlink.ac.uk/topcat/sun253/versions.html
• http://www.starlink.ac.uk/stilts/sun256/versions.html
• http://www.starlink.ac.uk/stil/sun252/history.html

The UK’s AstroGrid project within which TOPCAT, STILTS and STIL have been supported, developed and maintained for the last three years has been terminated, and applications to fund a follow-on project for UK Virtual Observatory work have been unsuccessful. Attempts will be made to seek some other arrangement under which support for this software can continue, but as things stand it is likely that the author will no longer be available to work on it from around November 2009.  The same applies to JSAMP. See http://www.star.bristol.ac.uk/~mbt/future.html for more details.