In the past few months, we have carefully considered what the first stable release of ImageJ 2.0.0 should entail, as well as the timeline and plan for that release.
The focus of the initial stable 2.0.0 release will be a unified application bundle that provides several key built-in components—in particular: the Updater and the Script Editor. While the Fiji distribution of ImageJ has been structured as this sort of unified bundle for years, Fiji also includes 300+ plugins focused on the life sciences, which are not necessarily relevant to every ImageJ user. The ImageJ2 release will include a set of core components useful to the ImageJ community as a whole, on top of which projects like Fiji can build.
We are targeting the following goals for a June 1 release of ImageJ 2.0.0:
- Integrate ImageJ2 into the ImageJ 1.x user interface. In a nutshell, this means providing support for ImageJ2’s parameter-based commands from the classic ImageJ 1.x interface. The stable release of ImageJ 2.0.0 will continue to use the classic interface, with the “modern” interface remaining available as well, but still in beta. Similarly, the ImageJ2 data model (based on ImgLib2) will continue to be available, but also still in beta.
- Unified image file I/O driven by the SCIFIO library. ImageJ2 will overcome the extensibility limitations imposed by ImageJ 1.x’s “HandleExtraFileTypes” mechanism.
- Improved imagej.net website encompassing all content from mirror.imagej.net (ImageJ 1.x content), developer.imagej.net (ImageJ 2.x content) and wiki.imagej.net (community content including Fiji). This will involve migration of some “developer” content to the wiki, as well as a better set of front pages that provide clear & easy access to ImageJ and Fiji downloads.
- A well-vetted release of the burgeoning ImageJ Ops project for easy development of reusable image processing algorithms.
- Stable release of the ImageJ-OMERO interoperability library, including support for calling many ImageJ 1.x plugins from OMERO.
- A final logo for ImageJ 2.0.0, chosen by a community logo competition.
- Manuscript drafts for several software components of the ImageJ software stack.
- Cleanup and reconciliation of the Trac and GitHub ImageJ issue trackers.
If you have questions or ideas relating to any of these goals, we welcome your feedback on the Mailing Lists!
P.S.: Not an April Fools joke. ;-)
