[ImageJ-devel] Upcoming, exciting changes in Fiji

[Johannes Schindelin]

Dear Fiji users,

it is my great pleasure to announce that we are very close to releasing a cool
new feature in Fiji very soon now: Help>Switch to Modern Mode.

As many of you know, there is a next generation of ImageJ underway (nicknamed
"ImageJ2") which aims at a major redesign in particular of the software
architecture to harden ImageJ for future demands, such as allowing higher
dimensionalities, vastly different storage mechanisms, algorithms being
implemented in a truly data type independent way, and allowing its plugins to
be run on a cluster without any graphical user interface, or even in the
context of other applications without imposing the ImageJ user interface.

ImageJ2 also allowed us to migrate a couple of Fiji components to ImageJ2, for
the following benefits:

- more robust development due to the facilities provided by ImageJ2 (a trusty
  server infrastructure that builds, tests and notifies developers of
  breakages they caused), deploys and serves the software for ease of use
  both by developers and users.

- Fiji can focus more on life sciences while ImageJ2 maintains the code that
  is not really specific to life sciences, such as the updater, the launcher,
  the script editor, etc

ImageJ2 is in its beta phase, and the upcoming changes (which are not yet
in beta phase, but very much in alpha phase) will allow all Fiji users to
check it out and to develop and run ImageJ2 plugins by calling Help>Switch
to Modern Mode. Once in modern mode, you can switch back to the legacy
mode easy enough, using Help>Switch to Legacy Mode.

The idea is that the data are available in both modes -- insofar possible: all
of the images that can be represented in legacy mode can be handled in the
modern mode, but the opposite is not true. For example if you have a
double-precision, 6-dimensional image, you can open and process it in the
modern mode, but you will not be able to handle it in legacy mode.

For backwards-compatibility, Fiji will start up in legacy mode until
ImageJ2 is robust enough; it will then ask the user -- once! -- which
startup mode to use by default.

Needless to say, the changes required both in Fiji and ImageJ2 to accomodate
for the legacy and modern modes are rather extensive. And while we worked very
hard on making it robust, undoubtedly this developer will have introduced one
or the other regression.

Therefore, I would like to suggest for Fiji users in a critical phase of their
project (such as submitting a paper, or preparing for a workshop) to *hold off*
updating Fiji for the extent of that criticial work. For what it is worth: this
is in general a very sound advice: if you require a stable software for a few
days or weeks, do not update it in that time period.

However, if you do not have any critical work lined up, now might be a good
opportunity to make sure that your favorite workflows do not get broken by
the changes about to be introduced into Fiji.

Thanks for the attention, and have fun,
Johannes (on the behalf of the Fiji team and the ImageJ2 developers)