Version 0.8.0

The 0.8.0 release is a minor release with some exciting new features and a large number of bug fixes and enhancements. Many thanks to @FabianHofmann, @jomey, @ablythed, @jlstevens, @hoxbro, @michaelaye, @MridulS, @ppwadhwa, @maximlt, @philippjfr for contributing!

Main new features:

• Add ability to call interactive on bound functions (#720)
• Add support to the Matplotlib and Plotly backends (#653)
• Add the hvPlotExplorer, a Panel UI component designed to explore data (#638, #639, #651, #710, #726)

Enhancements:

• Interactive:
  • Allow using getitem on an accessor in interactive (#633)
  • Allow attribute access on ufunc on interactive (#635)
  • Enhancements for interactive API (#640)
  • Flatten op_args to be able to find nested widgets (#699)
• Allow dynspread to be used with rasterize (#637)
• Add a title to xarray plots with scalar coords (#659)
• Adding datashade and rasterize options to scatter_matrix (#495)
• Update the default internal value of clim to support Matplotlib (#679)
• Ensure bokeh/panel extension is loaded only once (#686)
• Add support for planar layout from Networkx (#700)
• Wrap color in hv.dim when it matches a dimension/column (#717)
• Expose datashader line_width and rescale_discrete_levels options (#731)
• Improve array-like handling for x and y inputs (#714)

Fixes:

• Interactive:
  • Interactive fixes (#630)
  • Fix for interactive transform (#632)
  • Fix issue with accessors on interactive (#641)
  • Consistently dereference attribute access (#642)
• State that the data cannot be symmetric if it's empty (#680)
• Disable hover on errorbars plot (#721)
• Fix application of the scale argument for geoviews features (#725)

Documentation:

• Add scatter matrix reference (#689)
• Plotting user guide enhancement (#694)
• Download a tutorial file with the right filename (#711)
• Add more imports to try/except import check (#693)
• Various minor documentation enhancements and fixes (#625, #643, #644, #663, #678, #722)

Maintenance:

• Drop support for py2.7, min supported version is py3.6 now (#702)
• Switch to Pytest and run the CI on Python 3.6, 3.8 and 3.9 (#703)
• Changed to packaging.version (#708)
• Fix a broken test due to PROJ unexpectedly matching a normal string (#660)
• Various improvements to the CI (#690, #691. #709, #712, #715, #719, #724, #727, #730, #732, #733, #734, #735)