BEAUti

If you want to sample tip dates, you can create an MRCA prior in the priors panel (by clicking the little ‘+’ button at the bottom of the screen). Once you specified the set of taxa and an age distribution, click the ‘tips only’ checkbox, and a tip sampling operator will be automatically added.

Multi-monophyletic constraints through Newick

BEAUti now allows packages to specify add package specific priors; when you click the ‘+’ button at the bottom of the priors tab, and a package (such as BEASTLabs that can add a multi-monophyletic prior) provides a new prior a dialog pops up showing a list to choose from. By default, and MRCA prior is added if no other package provides anything. The multi-monophyletic prior from BEASTLabs allows you to specify a large number of monophyletic constraints through a tree in Newick format.

Microsattelite support

Another way packages now can extend BEAUti is by catering for package specific file formats. For example, the BEASTvntr package reads in alignments from a comma separated file format and interprets them as numbers of tandem repeats. The BEASTvntr provides microsattelite support.

Misc

Gamma distribution now allows multiple parameterisations: shape/scale, shape/rate, shape/mean, and one parameter, but defaults to the shape/scale as in previous version.

When saving a file to XML from BEAUti, all packages used in the XML are now encoded in XML, so when starting BEAST on a different computer, it can provide better error reporting of missing packages.

Better looking on high-res screens.

BEAST

Allow multiple citation annotations per class.

Allow trait sets with unspecified dates instead of failing when not all taxa had a date specified.

Allow multiple arguments to Sum so you can add values from various sources.

Improved error reporting, as usual.

Package Manager

The GUI version of the package manager now has links to documentation. By clicking the link of a particular package, a web browser opens that should bring you a page with package specific information.

Some work has been done to make the layout of the package manager look better.

Misc

TreeAnnotator fix for phylogeography in low-mem mode — previously, any meta data in array format such as location information was ignored.

LogCombiner suppresses duplicate ‘=’ in tree output.