Release of ImageJ 2.0.0-alpha3

[ctrueden]

Hi everyone,

Yesterday the ImageJDev team <http://imagejdev.org/collaborators> released
an alpha of ImageJ2, version 2.0.0-alpha3.

This is an "alpha"-quality release, meaning the code is not finished, nor is
the design fully stabilized. We are releasing it for early community
feedback, and to demonstrate project directions and progress.

For this release, like
2.0.0-alpha1<http://imagejdev.org/2011/04/01/imagej-v200-alpha1>and
2.0.0-alpha2 <http://imagejdev.org/2011/05/01/imagej-v200-alpha2>, we have
tried to model the application after ImageJ v1.x as much as is reasonable.
However, please be aware that version 2.0.0 is essentially a total rewrite
of ImageJ from the ground up. It provides backward compatibility with older
versions of ImageJ by bundling the latest v1.x code and translating between
"legacy" and "modern" image structures.

The most significant advancement for 2.0.0-alpha3 is partial support for
regions of interest (ROIs), via the
JHotDraw<http://www.randelshofer.ch/oop/jhotdraw/index.html>library.
It is now possible to draw rectangles, ellipses and polygons in an
ImageJ2 display. However, please note that the ROI support is still
substantially incomplete.

We have also improved the legacy layer so that many ImageJ1 plugins work
better, although it is still far from perfect. There is partial support for
preserving both ROIs and color lookup tables (LUTs) between IJ1 and IJ2
plugin executions, meaning that you can draw a ROI and then execute an IJ1
plugin, and it will operate on only the pixels within the ROI.

USERS: PLEASE DO NOT USE THIS RELEASE FOR ANYTHING IMPORTANT. There are
many, many issues and limitations. You may want to wait until the first BETA
release to report bugs, as the code is still under very heavy development.

DEVELOPERS: We are particularly interested in any feedback you may have on
the design of the project. See the source code for details:
  http://imagejdev.org/source-code

You can download the release from:
  http://imagejdev.org/downloads

That page also has a table of planned future releases and roadmap links for
the project.

For more details on the ImageJ developments, see the web site at:
  http://imagejdev.org/

Regards,
Curtis Rueden
ImageJDev project lead
Laboratory for Optical and Computational Instrumentation<http://loci.wisc.edu/>
University of Wisconsin-Madison