[ome-users] 4.2.0 release of Bio-Formats

[Melissa Linkert]

Hi all,

Today LOCI (http://loci.wisc.edu) and Glencoe Software
(http://glencoesoftware.com) have (finally!) released version 4.2 of
Bio-Formats (http://loci.wisc.edu/bio-formats).

This release includes the following major changes:

* Fixed many, many bugs in all aspects of Bio-Formats
* Reworked ImageJ plugins to be more user- and developer-friendly
* Added many new unit tests
* Added support for approximately 25 new file formats, primarily in the SPM domain
* Rewrote underlying I/O infrastructure to be thread-safe and based on Java NIO
* Rewrote OME-XML parsing/generation layer; OME-XML 2010-06 is now supported
* Improved support for exporting large images
* Improved support for exporting to multiple files
* Updated logging infrastructure to use slf4j and log4j

You can download the latest release at:

http://loci.wisc.edu/bio-formats/downloads

We would like to thank all of our users and contributing developers for
their help in producing this release - as always, we simply couldn't
continue to maintain Bio-Formats without the bug reports, patches, and
sample files submitted by the community.

Also, as many of you know already, we have recently published a paper in
the Journal of Cell Biology (see http://jcb.rupress.org/content/189/5/777.full)
that explains the greater purpose behind Bio-Formats - namely, to
provide standardised access to metadata in the near-absence of
standardised file formats.

If you have questions, comments or concerns regarding Bio-Formats we
would love to hear them.  Bug reports and general usage questions should
be sent to the Bio-Formats developers at bioformats at loci.wisc.edu.
Licensing and commercial usage questions should be sent to
bioformats at glencoesoftware.com.

Regards,

Melissa Linkert
Glencoe Software, Inc.