General

I took a break for a couple of months, but I'm back on track. The next version will be mostly maintenance and minor features, but I'm spinning ideas at the moment. The nightly-build can be cloned and tested from github.

In my last week at the CRP Tudor in Luxembourg, I released the latest version 1.1 of the program.
For me the project is still interesting, but due to work and my studies I will not be able to commit as much time as I did in the last year. To allow continuation of the development for anybody who is interested I decided to move my development from a private SVN-Repository at my university to a public Development-Repository.

For a different project I already worked with GIT and I was pleasantly surprised - once branching is common for you, you don't want to go back to anything else. GitHub is a platform for project development and free to use for open-source projects. The cool thing about Git in general and GitHub in particular is the easy branching and forking. You can fork my project easily and while you develop in your own project clone, you can easily invite me to pull your changes back into my code. GitHub is like a social network for projects and everybody who is interested can clone and fork the project.

In the future I will run two branches, the master branch will be the stable version, which hopefully always works and will always run as good as possible. I will develop on the development branch incase me or somebody else wants to start new features.

ImageFlow-Repository at Github

This is the new stable release of the application. It introduces some new features. Among them is Grouping of units, new data types to use within the workflow and Stack-support.

Description

ImageFlow is a node-based Macro-Editing interface for ImageJ.

More details in the information sheet.

Documentation on the Unit-Element XML-Specification.
The new version brought agaimupdates to the specification. The changes are noted in the document.

Installation

Requires: Java Runtime Environment 1.5
Tested on Windows XP, Ubuntu and Mac OS X 10.4

Run as standalone application:

1. Download the archive


2. Extract into a directory on your hard drive


3. Launch the Imageflow_.jar

Run as ImageJ-Plugin:

1. Download the archive and extract the included Imageflow-folder.


2. Navigate to the plugins-directory of your ImageJ-installation


3. Copy the Imageflow-folder into ImageJ's plugin-folder


4. Restart ImageJ and a new menu-item for Imageflow appears in the Plugins-Menu.

Download

Download Imageflow 1.1 for Windows, Linux and Mac OSX

Download Imageflow 1.1 Java Sources

As always, I appreciate bugreports or other feedback.

The work at Tudor has been productive. We added several new features in the last couple of weeks. We aren't finished yet, but we like to get a new version out before our last weeks are beginning.

Our main focus has been on make workflows more flexible and allowing more ways of prototyping. Up untill now only image-data could be processed in the workflow. This has been extend to other datatypes and so you can also do calculations within the flow. The basics are implemented and we added the most common units. this will be included for testing in the next version.

Version 1.1 should be regarded as unstable. We tested the last few days and tried to find as many bugs as possible, but since there were some bigger changes internally, We suggest some caution. Workflows from version 1.0 should be compatible.

Also new are some features regarding the handling of workflows. It is now possible to group selected units into one element. These groups can be edited and degrouped later. The workflow is still fully functional, although the presentation is much simplified.

More soon.

This is the first version of Imageflow I regard as stable. Frido and me tried to test it thoroughly over the past week and hopefully we missed nothing. On the other hand, if we do missed something, we have the best reasons to continue development.

Description

ImageFlow is a node-based Macro-Editing interface for ImageJ.

More details in the information sheet.

Documentation on the Unit-Element XML-Specification.
The new version brought some slight updates to the specification. The changes are noted in the document.

Installation

Requires: Java Runtime Environment 1.5
Tested on Windows XP, Ubuntu and Mac OS X 10.4

Run as standalone application:

1. Download the archive


2. Extract into a directory on your harddrive


3. Launch the Imageflow_.jar

Run as ImageJ-Plugin:

1. Download the archive and extract the included Imageflow-folder.


2. Navigate to the plugins-directory of your ImageJ-installation


3. Copy the Imageflow-folder into ImageJ's plugin-folder


4. Restart ImageJ and a new menu-item for Imageflow appears in the Plugins-Menu.

Download

Download Imageflow 1.0 for Windows, Linux and Mac OSX

Download Imageflow 1.0 Java Sources

As always, I appreciate bugreports or other feedback, especially regarding the direction this tool should take.

I had an interesting talk yesterday, with an interesting question. What's the direction?
Honestly that's a very good question. I have the feeling ImageFlow is a very nice tool, but I don't really know how it is used and therefore in which direction I should concentrate.

Speaking with Andreas and Frido here at Tudor we have many ideas, hopefully one for a proper direction as well.

Since october I have been working on the project. As you could follow in the blog, at time more active than others, but the progress is not the topic. I pritty much worked on my own and only consulted with my Professor every now and then. I presented the application to colleagues and friends and got a bit feedback, but I didn't really talk to the ImageJ-community about it, yet. It makes me even happier that people write me and compliment me on the program. It's beta, it's buggy, but I appreciate your feedback. Gives me great joy and motivation to continue to work on the first stable release.

(Even though I should be writing my thesis now )

The first version is released. This includes basically all functions of version 1, but is not thoroughly tested and therefore taken as non-stabile.

Description

ImageFlow is a node-based Macro-Editing interface for ImageJ.

More details in the information sheet.

Documentation on the Unit-Element XML-Specification.

Installation

Requires: Java Runtime Environment 1.5
Tested on Windows XP, Ubuntu and Mac OS X 10.4

Run as standalone application:

1. Download the archive


2. Extract into a directory on your harddrive


3. Launch the Imageflow_.jar

Run as ImageJ-Plugin:

1. Download the archive


2. Navigate to the plugins-directory of your ImageJ-installation


3. Create a subfolder called "ImageFlow"


4. Extract the archive into this folder.


5. Restart ImageJ and a new menu-item for Imageflow appears in the Plugins-Menu.

Download

Download Imageflow-binaries

Sources will be available for the final version or on request.

I appreciate bugreports or other kinds of feedback.

I'll continue the work on ImageFlow and beginn with the final phase of version 1.0 next week.

I'm busy with my regular courses and some not-study related project, so I haven't programmed on Imageflow alot.
I did some clean up and refactoring, removing some of the old ballast, that survived through the versions. I added some small things, but mostly, I'm on feature-freeze right now. I want to clean and fix the functions I have and add the strongly required checks and controll mechanism. This includes all graph utilities to check the connections, validity, verfy input and outputs types, catch loops and bugs. My scrapbook is doing a good job helping me to note idea I have, but I haven't programmed everything yet. Especially the loops give me headaches. I set up a small testframework in JUnit to test my models and the functionality. I'm up to 35 tests now and it's really handy.

One of the features that will get some intention later is the saving and loading of flows. There is already some XML-representation I'm going to use, but alot of work is yet to to.

As Willy Wonka used to say, go on go on, there is so much time and so little to see.

Yesterday I met with my professor who supervises my Bachelor-project. I presented my current state and we added some basic Properties-editing function, which works quite well actually. Basically we took the GenericDialogs, that ImageJ offers and used them to create the UnitElements Properties-Window. Much simpler than I actually thought.

Apart from that, I continued some work on the algorithms. The algorithm uses SelectionSort. Not the most efficient, but fast enough here. I'm working to find ways, to run Unit-Checks as well, so for example, that not-connected Units are discarded as soon as possible, thereby cleaning the UnitList.

Some small things on the GUI, the Popup-Menu is reworked. I excluded all Actions in actual Action-Classes. The clipboard functions work nicely, except for the Cut. If a Unit is cut and pasted back in, the Unit's MacroElement, the part which holds the ImageJ-syntax is null. Strange thing, I haven't yet figured out while.
Apart from that, I build some basic menus.

One thing missing in the whole application are the proper MVC-handlers. Changes in the model don't call back to the UI at the moment. So to update the GraphPanel you have to click or repaint manually. Of course this isn't nice yet. So one of the next tasks will be to incorporate some proper application-structure. I've been looking for Desktop-Application-Frameworks for Java, but apart from Jazz, which only supports Java6, while I work in Java5, I found nothing. So I'm back own my own and trying to find some nice structure.

This week is the official ImageJ Conference in Luxembourg, I won't be attending, but there will be a lecture about the project with the presentation of this programm.