OMERO Beta4.3.0 Release

Today, The OME Consortium (http://www.openmicroscopy.org/site/about/development-teams), is proud to announce the release of OMERO-Beta4.3.0.

This is a major release, focussing on new functionality for large, tiled images, and significant improvements in our client applications.

For full details of the OMERO Beta4.3.0 release, see:

http://trac.openmicroscopy.org.uk/ome/milestone/OMERO-Beta4.3

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

The major theme of 4.3.0 is what we refer to as "Big Images", namely images with X,Y images larger that 4k x 4k. With this release, OMERO's server and Java and web clients support tiling and image pyramids. This means we have the functionality you've probably seen in on-line map tools (e.g., http://maps.google.com), ready for use in any image file format supported by OMERO (and obviously Bio-Formats). This is especially important for digital pathology, and other uses of stitched imaging.

We're just returning from our annual OME Users Meeting (more details about that in a separate email). Getting 4.3.0 out the door and all the prep for the meeting has been a huge effort by the whole team. We've updated the Features page, but still need to get the demo videos done.. We'll get all the content there in the next week or two.

For developers and sysadmins, there are two things to know about the 4.3.0 release. First, we've implemented a JPEG2000 compression engine within OMERO.server, and enabled support for the resulting image pyramids within the OMERO API, and the OMERO clients. In addition, to make this functionality work, we've taken steps towards a first implementation of the long-promised OMERO.fs. We'll publish full documentation on these facilities in the next few days.

For users, 4.3.0 supports large files from Aperio, NanoZoomer, and others should now work in OMERO. Obviously, this takes us into new imaging domains, which of course is very exciting.

While the major focus of 4.3.0 is Big Images, there are a number of other new updates. For users, we've worked hard to synchronise functionality and appearance across the OMERO clients. This includes viewing of ROIs in OMERO.web. We're not done, but we've made alot of progress. Moreover, data import is now MUCH faster and available from within OMERO.insight.

Upgrade from 4.2.2 to 4.3.0 is fairly straightforward-- see

http://www.openmicroscopy.org/site/support/omero4/server/upgrade

for more details.

We are already at work on 4.3.1, which will fix bugs and add in some small new features in OMERO clients. Check the Roadmap pages for more info (http://trac.openmicroscopy.org.uk/ome/milestone/OMERO-Beta4.3.1).

Finally, for 4.3.0, we've instituted a much more intensive testing system (for details, see http://trac.openmicroscopy.org.uk/ome/wiki/TestingScenarios). Hopefully, you'll see this work (ALOT of work by the whole team) reflected in much more stable, usable software.

Our feedback system, OMERO.qa (http://qa.openmicroscopy.org.uk) is a facility users and developers can use to log comments and exceptions. OMERO.qa supports uploading of problematic data files, and tracking of responses to any user queries.

As always, thanks for your support.