As you may have seen on a previous article, the Gephi team has been hard at work over the past few months and is currently preparing to release version 0.11 of your favorite network analysis application. All development work has been completed but before releasing it we want to strengthen it, via testing it on different configurations.

We need your help! This post explains how to test Gephi 0.11 and send us your feedback. It also briefly outlines the new features of this version. 

Test the development version…

Go to Development Builds and download Gephi 0.11-SNAPSHOT or click on the appropriate link below:

• gephi-0.11.0-SNAPSHOT-windows-x64.exe (Windows)
• gephi-0.11.0-SNAPSHOT-macos-x64.dmg (Mac OS X)
• gephi-0.11.0-SNAPSHOT-macos-aarch64.dmg (Mac OS X Silicon)
• gephi-0.11.0-SNAPSHOT-linux-aarch64.tar.gz (Linux aarch64)
• gephi-0.11.0-SNAPSHOT-linux-x64.tar.gz (Linux)

Install it on your computer like you would install Gephi. It can be installed alongside an existing Gephi version.

Note that Plugins aren’t available. They can be installed manually via their NBM file though.

… and share your feedback with us!

To share your feedback with us, please join the Gephi Desktop Beta Test on Element. It’s easier for us to engage with you, discuss your experiences, and clarify your configuration than to receive issues on GitHub. You can also use this channel if you have any questions or if you’re having trouble getting this beta to work.

If you find an issue, please provide enough context so that we can reproduce them. Please provide on which OS you’re testing, and if the issue is related to the visualization engine which graphic card you have. No need to report anything related to Java versions as Gephi embeds the appropriate Java version. Element supports uploading images and videos.

The Gephi space on Element also contains a Community channel where you can chat about Gephi. You’re welcome to join!

New Features

New Visualization Engine

Gephi has a brand new visualization engine, powering “Overview”. This new engine is the result of multiple years of work. In this 0.11 release, our goal was to have feature parity with the previous engine. Therefore, the way networks look on Overview hasn’t changed and we haven’t introduced many new features. However, we’ve focused on performance improvements for large graphs and paved the way for future extensions.

Because it’s been rewritten from scratch and OpenGL compatibility is very dependent on the computer you’re running Gephi on, there might be bugs or compatibility issues that we haven’t seen. That’s why we’re very interested in you giving it a spin.

Better alignment between Overview and Preview

A common complaint in Gephi is configuring something the visualization in Overview (font sizes, edge weight etc.) and having to start over in Preview.

We’ve addressed that and closed the gap so that the transition should be much easier. We’ve particularly focused on edge thickness and labels. For instance, now by default Preview uses the same font size and scale as Overview. It’s still possible to customize the font in Preview thought.

More details here if you’re interested.

Attributes Panel

We added an “Attributes” panel that shows the attribute values of the currently selected node.

We actually combined this new panel with the pre-existing “Edit” feature. The panel can either be in selection mode or in edit mode. Edit remains a Tool available in the toolbar, and a contextual action in the Data Laboratory.

Label overlap avoidance algorithm

A new toggle button was added to the Visualization settings. When turned on, labels no longer overlap and the largest ones are chosen first. Also available in Preview.

Transform in one-click

Common transformations like Expand or Rotate were previously mixed with force directed layouts. We added simple buttons in Layout to support these common operations, in one-click. In addition, we added a Mirror transformation, which was previously missing.

We kept the legacy Layouts for now but will remove them in the next release.

New icons

All of the legacy Gephi icons have been replaced by refreshed icons. In addition, icons are now SVG-based, so they look better and are easier to maintain. Both light and dark modes are supported.

We did our best to design the icons so that they represent the feature / settings they control. However, sometimes it might not be clear enough. If you have suggestions, please let us know.

New languages

New languages have reached the minimum threshold of translation completion to be included as a new supported language: Greek, Hungarian, Korean, Swedish and Ukrainian language

When you see gaps in your language, there is still time to contribute to the localization via Weblate. We’ll include any new translations that you provide until the release date.

Default settings and presets

We’ve added more “Default settings” across Visualization, Layout, Appearance and Preview to set default values that persist across Gephi executions.

We’ve also improved Layout Presets, so that one can choose a Default Preset applied to a Layout.

Thanks in advance for your valuable feedback, we look forward to hear what you think about the new features. Stay tuned for the official release coming up soon.