Macnification

After being under development for more than a year, we are proud to release Macnification 1.0!
I won't repeat Macnification's features here, as you can read about that elsewhere on this website. I just want to give some insight into the development process and the application's philosophy.

Development
From the very beginning, we decided that Macnification would be Leopard-only. The flip side of this is that development has been a rough ride, especially in the beginning when working with early Leopard betas. However, since Leopard 1.0 has been released, we really made great progress and we are glad we made the decision to go Leopard. That has enabled us to take full advantage of ImageKit, an amazing Leopard framework for managing and displaying images. Both Macnification's image browser and the full-screen image view have been entirely built around ImageKit. However, ImageKit is not the only Leopard advantage: Macnification makes extensive use of Core Animation: not just for some fancy UI effects (although we couldn't resist to have these too) but also for real-world functionality: the entire stack view is completely built on top of Core Animation. As a result, the stack view is not only drop dead gorgeous, the animation also offers the advantage that you can easily see what's going on, for example when creating a virtual cut (z-slice) through the stack.
Those are just two advantages of being Leopard-only, but there are many more, such as the improvements in Core Data, Core Image, the fact that Time Machine will backup your entire Macnification library without any work on your end, the ability to use Quick Look when searching Macnification with Spotlight, etc. If you think about it, we probably could not have done Macnification without Leopard.


Philosophy: focusing on electron microscopy
From the beginning, we wanted Macnification to focus on electron microscopy, as we think there is the biggest need for microscopy applications on Mac OS X (and also because I have quite a lot of experience with electron microscopy myself). The plan was to create a one-stop workflow solution for digital electron microscopy, not unlike what Aperture offers for digital photography. During development, we regularly checked with scientists 'in the field' to see if we were still on the right track. As development progressed, more and more scientists using fluorescence and confocal microscopy showed their interest in Macnification too. Although Macnification's main focus is still electron microscopy, we broadened Macnification's horizon based on the feedback we received and we added functionality that's useful for these microscopy types as well. For example, Macnification can now import .lsm files and read some of the metadata. We also greatly improved the analysis features to make them faster when used on large image stacks. We hope that will enable scientists to start using Macnification with their fluorescence and confocal images, although we realize we still have much work to bring Macnification at the same level it is at for electron microscopy.

Those are just some thoughts I wanted to share right before the release. In future blog posts, we will definitely share more development stories, and of course, we will also report on the application itself and how it is received by the scientific community. For now, we just want to say thank you to everyone who has made this possible, including many people at Apple, our beta testers, people from the OME group and last but not least our families. Time for a drink!