Plots.jl NEWS

I (@tbreloff) am in development of totally revamped internals, in which much of the logic in building series is changed to recursively stacking recipes in a modular fashion. I'll write a blog post sometime soon detailing why this is amazing, but for now you can get a taste of it by looking at the RecipesBase readme
Version 0.6.2 will be the last full release of the "Old Plots", and the 0.6 minor will be only small bug fixes.
All new development should target 0.7 (recipes and subplots)!

0.7 (WIP on tb_recipes/dev and master)

linewidth fixes
markershape fix
converted center calc to centroid for shapes
new dependency on RecipesBase
REQUIRE upper limit for RecipesBase: 0.0.1
GR fixes/improvements (@jheinen)
- support zlims, bins
- allow Plots colormaps
- other bug fixes
- native image support
PGFPlots fixes/improvements (@pkofod)
DataFrames are handled by recipes
Plotly: zaxis, tick rotation, 3d axis fix
Improvements in handling discrete data
Support for image display
arrow keyword and support for adding arrows to paths
changed quiver recipe to use arrows
Bug fixes for boxplots, heatmaps, and more

apply_series_recipe framework for built-in recipes
boxplot/violin recipes
errorbar/ribbon recipes
quiver recipe
polar coordinates
better support for shapes and custom polygons (see batman)
z-axis keywords
3D indexing overhaul: push!, append! support
matplotlib colormap constants (:inferno is the new default colormap for Plots)
typealias KW Dict{Symbol,Any} used in place of splatting in many places
png generation for plotly backend using wkhtmltoimage
normalize and weights keywords
background/foreground subcategories for fine-tuning of looks
add_theme/set_theme and ggplot2 theme (see this issue)
PLOTS_DEFAULT_BACKEND environment variable
barh linetype
support for non-gridded surfaces with pyplot's trisurface
pyplot surface zcolor
internal refactor of supported.jl
wrap method to bypass input processing
translate, scale and rotate methods for coordinates and shapes
and many more minor fixes and improvements

old heatmaps have been renamed to hist2d, and true heatmaps implemented (see https://github.com/tbreloff/Plots.jl/issues/147)
lots of reorganization and redesign of the internals
lots of renaming to keep to conventions: AbstractPlot, AbstractBackend, etc
initial redesign of layouts
integration with Atom PlotPane
arc diagram and chord diagram (thanks to @diegozea: see https://github.com/tbreloff/Plots.jl/issues/163)
work on GR, GLVisualize, and PGFPlots backends (thanks @jheinen @dlfivefifty @pkofod)
improvements to Plotly setup (thanks @spencerlyon2)
overhaul to series creation logic and groupby mechanic
replace Dict with typealias KW Dict{Symbol,Any} in many places, also replacing keyword arg splatting
new shape linetype for plotting polygons in plot-coordinates (see https://github.com/tbreloff/ExamplePlots.jl/blob/master/notebooks/batman.ipynb)
many other fixes

Added GR.jl as a backend (unfinished but functional) All credit to @jheinen
Set defaults within backend calls (i.e. gadfly(legend=false))
abline!; also extrema allows plotting functions without giving x (i.e. plot(cos, 0, 10); plot!(sin)) @pkofod @joshday
Integration with PlotlyJS.jl for using Plotly inside a Blink window @spencerlyon2
The Plotly backend has been split into my built-in version (plotly()) and @spencerlyon2's backend (plotlyjs())
Revamped backend setup code for easily adding new backends
New docs (WIP) at http://plots.readthedocs.org/
Overhaul to :legend keyword (see https://github.com/tbreloff/Plots.jl/issues/135)
New dependency on Requires, allows auto-loading of DataFrames support
Support for plotting lists of Tuples and FixedSizeArrays
new @animate macro for super simple animations (see https://github.com/tbreloff/Plots.jl/issues/111#issuecomment-181515616)
allow Function for :fillrange and zcolor arguments (for example: scatter(sin, 0:10, marker=15, fill=(cos,0.4), zcolor=sin))
allow vectors of PlotText without x/y coords (for example: scatter(rand(10), m=20, ann=map(text, 1:10)))
Lots and lots of fixes