[ome-devel] OMERO Beta-4.1 Release

[Jason Swedlow]

Dear All-

Today, The OME Consortium is proud to release OMERO-Beta4.1.

This release follows strong feedback we received at our May 2009  
User's Mtg at Institut Pasteur, Paris.  We've made substantial efforts  
to improve support for metadata, especially for confocal microscopy,  
and ensure OMERO supports all of the file formats enabled by Bio- 
Formats. We have enabled export to OME-TIFF and QuickTime/AVI/MPEG.   
We've made various improvements to OMERO clients to improve workflow  
and use.

You'll notice a substantial increase in the visibility of metadata in  
OMERO.  We hope that this serves to help improve metadata support in  
scientific imaging.

The full list of features in OMERO, including  new features in OMERO  
Beta-4.1, is at http://openmicroscopy.org/site/products/feature-list
Most features are accompanied by a short movie that shows that  
functionality in action.

The software is available at http://openmicroscopy.org

Some notes on this release:

-- We have established a new feature-- OMERO.qa (http://qa.openmicroscopy.org.uk 
).  This is a feedback mechanism, to allow us to communicate more  
effectively with our community.  OMERO.qa supports uploading of  
problematic files, and tracking of responses to any user queries.   
Moreover, OMERO.qa includes a demo feature: in collaboration with  
Urban Liebel at  Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, we are providing  
demo accounts for OMERO.  Use the Demo link at qa to contact us if you  
are interested in this.

  -- We are releasing a number of "Prerelease features".  For users  
who have had problems with memory-based crashes in OMERO.insight, the  
new OpenGL-based ImageViewer may be of interest. Also, we are now  
taking advantage of our modeling of HCS data, and releasing our first  
clients that support Flex, MIAS, and InCell 1000 file formats.   
OMERO.dropbox has been substantially extended, and now supports all  
the file formats supported by OMERO.

-- Some of you know that the OME Consortium puts strong emphasis on  
the usability of our tools for both users and developers.  Through  
previous funding from the EPSRC, we, in collaboration with Catriona  
Macaulay and Peter Gregor,  established UsableImage (http://usableimage.org 
) , a project dedicated to driving usability in academic scientific  
software.  While we continue to try to run this project, our current  
funding period has ended, and the EPSRC turned down our request for  
further funding.  For this reason, OMERO Beta-4.1 has not been through  
the same usability analysis as our previous releases.  We hope to re- 
establish this part of the project with alternative funding in the  
future.

Finally, we are hugely grateful to those who attended the OME User's  
Meeting in May 2009.  The feedback and conclusions from that meeting  
have driven our work all summer and have been our mantras for these  
past few months.  We have received very helpful testing, feedback,  
data submission, and feature suggestions  from many members of the  
community.  There are too many to name (and we are not always clear  
whether people want their good name associated with us), but we are  
particularly thankful for data, testing, and/or comments and  
suggestions from: Martin Spitaler and Mark Woodbridge (Imperial), Alex  
Sossick (Cambridge), Jay Copeland (Harvard), Frans Cornelissen and  
Frederick Michielssen (Johnson & Johnson), Michael Porter and Raman  
Das (Dundee), Bernhard Holländer and Karsten Kottig (PerkinElmer),   
Karol Kozak (ETH Zurich), and a number of people on the OME Forums.   
Submitted data is hugely valuable and provides us with concrete  
information we can use.  Moreover, the testing and feedback we get  
from external sources is simply invaluable.  We know this takes time  
(an all too precious resource), and are grateful for all of this.

OMERO Beta-4.1 is focused on what we called DataIn/DataOut at Paris in  
May09.  We will show new functionality at ASCB in San Diego.  Data  
duplication is a hot issue, and will be addressed in upcoming releases.

As always, thanks for your support.

Cheers,

Jason and the OME Consortium






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