Macnification

Since Macnification's introduction on May 6, we have been planning and working on Macnification 1.1, the first update to our award-winning microscopy app. It's about time to share some information on the progress we have been making with what is shaping up to be a significant update.

New and updated features include:
- Support for 16-bit images
- Non-destructive Lookup Tables (LUTs)
- Improved ROI auto-detection speed and functionality
- Images can now be saved to a number of formats, including tiff, jpeg, ...
- It's now possible to add batch comments to images
- Added option to define custom fields (metadata)
- Calibrations can now be copied and then pasted onto multiple images
- Improved collage workflow
- Keywords are now sorted automatically and can be rearranged

These are just some of the new features and enhancements in Macnification 1.1. Needless to say, we have made numerous under-the-hood improvements to boost overall performance and reliability. More enhancements and new features will be introduced before the 1.1 release, which is due sometime in September.

Drew McCormack from MacResearch.org wrote an interesting article about the relevance of user interface design in scientific applications. Introducing the Papers generation, McCormack lauds Papers and Macnification for their attention to the user experience. He argues that by making the tools more attractive and easy to use, scientists will be far more efficient. We can't agree more, of course. Moreover, we think Drew is totally right when he attributes this new wave of scientific apps on Mac OS X to the elegance and ease of use of Cocoa and its NeXT predecessor. An insightful article.

We are very proud to announce that Macnification has received an Apple Design Award for Best Mac OS X Leopard User Experience! The prestigious prize has been awarded at the annual design award ceremony during Apple's worldwide developer conference (WWDC 2008) in San Francisco.

Scientific software and good user interface design are not often used in the same sentence. With Macnification we wanted to prove that scientific software does not need to be confusing or hard to use. Apart from the interface itself, Macnification received praise for the adoption of many Mac OS X technologies and for its platform innovation.

We are honored to receive this recognition from the user interface design team at Apple, probably the best UE team in the world. Thanks again to everyone who contributed to this! The significance of this award for Macnification and for our company can hardly be underestimated. It will help us to keep improving existing products and raise the bar even more for future apps.

One Big Lab is devoting its latest blog post to innovative Mac applications for science and they have some good things to say about Macnification: "For the cell and molecular biologists out there, here's a solution for your image processing needs. Macnification is like an extended iPhoto for microscopy. The full feature set looks impressive - you can track experiments, manage metadata, make measurements, create movies, and generate virtual z-slices through multiple images, all in one sleek application. I don't work with microscopy images, but now I wish I did!"

On watchingApple.com, Macnification's UI is being featured as an example for other Mac OS X applications. The article explains how we used many existing metaphors - often created by Apple - to make for a more intuitive and familiar user experience. In addition, the post also discusses dialog design.
Needless to say, we are flattered to see Macnification being mentioned as an example of good UI design. We have invested heavily in the user experience (see also the previous post) and we are delighted that this is paying off.

All icons in Macnification, including the application icon itself, have been professionally designed by Enhanced Labs, one of the world's leading design firms for Mac OS X icons. Given the number of icons in Macnification and the complexity of the underlying functionality, this has not been an easy task. On the Enhanced Labs weblog, Edward Scherf, lead designer for this project, discusses the challenges and explains the process of creating artwork for a scientific Pro-application.

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!