Bio-Formats 4.2.0 release

Today LOCI (http://loci.wisc.edu) and Glencoe Software (http://www.glencoesoftware.com) have 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@loci.wisc.edu. Licensing and commercial usage questions should be sent to bioformats@glencoesoftware.com.