JMARS News Letter!

Greetings JMARS users!

It occurred to us recently that we're probably one of the few organizations you've interacted with that (until now) hasn't sent out an email detailing our response to current world events. We're safe and doing our best to maintain social isolation. Thankfully, we are still capable of developing and supporting the JMARS application remotely, but we are missing all of our routine opportunities to meet with our users in person.

To help replace some of our lost opportunities, I am happy to announce a few new initiatives our team has come up with.

1) Increased communication. We love to hear from you via email (help@jmars.asu.edu) but will do our best to keep e-mail communication from us to a minimum. We will, however, be increasing the frequency with which we post updates online. If you are interested in hearing from us more frequently, please follow JMARS on Facebook and/or Twitter (@jmars_gis), look for announcements on our website, post or check for updates on our forum, or read about the latest updates right from the JMARS login screen!

2) Virtual Office Hours. Sometimes it's easier to talk through an idea or problem interactively, so we're going to experiment with making parts of our development team available to take and respond to questions interactively on a scheduled basis. The specifics of this will evolve over time as we gauge demand and usefulness, but our first open session is planned for Friday, April 17th from noon-2 p.m. Arizona time (currently 3-5 p.m. Eastern US time). Details to participate will be posted on our website and social media accounts.

3) New JMARS Challenges! Starting next week we will begin posting a series of JMARS Challenges on our website and social media accounts, where we provide a set of clues to an interesting formation on Mars, and a few tips on how to find that feature using JMARS. Users will then be encouraged to find the feature themselves, and submit a screenshot with the correct location. Successful participants will receive praise and accolades, the satisfaction of learning to use new tools and data, and will be eligible to submit ideas for future JMARS Challenges.

4) What's New with JMARS? We are preparing a new series of short videos in which different team members will take turns introducing a new capability, a new data set, or an improved way to do something in JMARS. Watch for the first video to appear soon on our website and social media accounts.

Finally, we want to draw everyone's attention to what we're referring to as JMARS version 5. Many of you are aware that we've been working on an updated JMARS user interface for some time, with the most noticeable changes being a dark color scheme as well as a more modern look and feel. We are also actively working with a professional user interface design team with the goal of making common tasks in JMARS easier to achieve. We are NOT planning to remove any functionality, but instead are trying to make things more intuitive and consistent across the application. This has been and will continue to be a major undertaking, and things will continue to grow and evolve over time.

JMARS 5 is currently available in beta form from our website, and it is our intention for it to become the officially supported version within the next couple of months. The current versions of JMARS (4.x) will continue to operate for the foreseeable future, but we will soon be limiting development and bug fixes to the new interface.

To that end - if you haven't already done so - please download and try out the JMARS 5 beta! Let us know what you like, what you don't like, and if you run into any problems or weirdness that's not supposed to be there. We would like to address any major issues before we switch to JMARS 5 as the official production version, and we hope to minimize the additional impact on any of your work as we make these changes.

On behalf of the JMARS team, thanks and stay safe!

- Scott