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
