add 0.5.6 release notes

additional_notes/0.5.6/header.md

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+
+*Fri, Jan 17, 2025*
+
+🚧 *These notes are under construction while in pre-release* 🚧
+
+We’re happy to announce the release of napari 0.5.6!
+
+napari is a fast, interactive, multi-dimensional image viewer for Python. It’s designed for exploring, annotating, and analyzing multi-dimensional images. It’s built on Qt (for the GUI), VisPy (for performant GPU-based rendering), and the scientific Python stack (NumPy, SciPy, and friends).
+
+For more information, examples, and documentation, please visit our website: https://napari.org/

additional_notes/0.5.6/highlights.md

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+
+### Faster shapes 🚀
+
+For its whole history, napari has been a pure Python package. As we go deeper
+into its performance bottlenecks, though, we're finding that we need some
+compiled code. This is a big change to the napari installation story, though,
+so we are rolling it out slowly. But if you've been waiting forever to load
+your shapes data, this release has some enhancements for you (>2x speedup)!
+([#7346](https://github.com/napari/napari/pull/7346))
+
+To use this speedup, you'll need to:
+- install napari core developer Grzegorz Bokota's collection of performant
+  algorithms,
+  [PartSegCore-compiled-backend](https://pypi.org/project/PartSegCore-compiled-backend/).
+  You can install it automatically by pip installing `"napari[optional,pyqt]"`
+  (or a GUI backend of your choice among pyqt, pyqt6, pyside, pyside6) or
+  `"napari[all]"`.
+- *and*, in the napari advanced settings, tick the "Use C++ code to speed up
+  creation and updates of Shapes layers" box.
+
+Please give it a try and let us know if you encounter any issues! This is the
+beginning of a new era of performance improvements in napari, to help it live
+up to its promise of a *fast* viewer for n-dimensional data in Python!
+
+### New path drawing tool
+
+Drawing paths is easier and smoother with the open-line equilavent of the
+lasso tool. If you want to draw a curve through your data, whether with a
+mouse or a tablet+stylus, it is now much easier to freehand rather than
+clicking on individual points. Try it out!
+([#7099](https://github.com/napari/napari/pull/7099))
+
+![video of new path-drawing tool used to delineate a blood vessel](https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/978584f7-f707-4085-840f-a2f8fee12e21)
+
+### Other improvements
+
+Often, the important information in a layer name is at the *end* of the name
+rather than the beginning. We've improved the eliding (…) of long names by
+placing the ellipsis in the *middle* of the name rather than the end
+([#7461](https://github.com/napari/napari/pull/7461)).
+
+The default value of "flash" has been changed to `False` in
+`viewer.screenshot`, so that taking many screenshots in a script will not
+result in rapid flickering
+([#7476](https://github.com/napari/napari/pull/7476)). This is part of a
+broader accessibility initiative by recent contributor [Tim
+Monko](https://github.com/TimMonko) to improve napari for light-sensitive
+users ([#7433](https://github.com/napari/napari/issues/7433), and we are so
+grateful! 🙏
+
+Read on for the full list of changes since 0.5.5.

additional_notes/0.6.0/header.md

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+
+*Thu, Jan 30 2024*
+
+🚧 *These notes are under construction while in pre-release* 🚧
+
+We’re happy to announce the release of napari 0.6.0! The right-handed release! This release features major changes so read on to see how they might affect you!
+
+napari is a fast, interactive, multi-dimensional image viewer for Python. It’s designed for exploring, annotating, and analyzing multi-dimensional images. It’s built on Qt (for the GUI), VisPy (for performant GPU-based rendering), and the scientific Python stack (NumPy, SciPy, and friends).
+
+For more information, examples, and documentation, please visit our website: https://napari.org/

additional_notes/0.6.0/highlights.md

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+
+### Updated viewer handedness ✋
+
+So. Funny story. 😅
+
+For (checks notes) 5 years or so, napari has had a 3D view, and for those 5
+years, for almost all datasets, that view has been a *mirror image* of the 3D
+object they were trying to represent. Any biologists among you might have
+noticed that loading 3D molecular coordinates of DNA would result in a
+left-handed helix, while anatomists among you might have been surprised by how
+many of your samples suffered from [situs inversus
+totalis](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Situs_inversus)!
+
+By and large, many things that people care about work exactly the same in the
+mirror world — volume measurements, forces, tracking, speed, ... — so this bug
+has gone mostly unnoticed, or noticed and shrugged off and unfixed for all this
+time. But it's important for some things!  Your heart is on the left side of
+your body, but the right side of your mirror image's. This can be critical, for
+example, when using software to plan surgery! Thankfully, we are not aware of
+any cases of napari being used in this way. 😅
+
+napari uses zyx coordinates instead of xyz because it is the most natural way
+to work with NumPy arrays and the rest of the scientific Python imaging
+ecosystem. Flipping the axes in this way also changes the *handedness* of the
+space, *unless* you also flip the direction of one of the dimensions. The
+simplest way to illustrate this is [this 3D model of a right
+shoe](https://grabcad.com/library/anatomic-shoe-sole-euro-right-41-1), which looks
+like this in previous versions of napari:
+
+![right shoe rendered as a left shoe in napari](https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/c9190e2c-f35a-44d1-95d5-f9877dd4c843)
+
+and in 0.5.6+, thanks to [#7488](https://github.com/napari/napari/pull/7488):
+
+![right shoe correctly rendered as a right shoe in napari](https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/e187f5e7-8e4a-4526-bae9-80a9bec6fea3)
+
+Most users won't notice. But if you were among the users that noticed and you
+implemented workarounds in your code (such as setting the z-scale to a negative
+number), now is a good time to undo the workarounds for newer versions of
+napari! If you run into any issues please get in touch [on GitHub
+issues](https://github.com/napari/napari) or on our [Zulip chat room](https://napari.zulipchat.com)!