MicroView development continues with additional features being added with each alpha release.  While developing MicroView our primary focus has always been  analytic tool development, especially for microCT applications.  However, we recently took some time to complete the porting of Tkinter widgets found in older versions of MicroView to the newer wx interface that we're sporting in 2.5.0.  Completing this task allows us to re-examine a number of the open-source plugins in MicroView that we think need some attention, and we've started by rethinking volume rendering.  Based on the high-quality GPU-accelerated rendering code base found in recent versions of VTK, this renderer is significantly faster than the original renderer found in MicroView.  We believe it's also easier to use.  These days, GPU-accelerated volume rendering is pretty much a requirement for any visualization package if it wants to be taken seriously, so it's nice to check this off the development list.


If you've got a fairly decent NVidia or ATI GPU, give it a try and let us know your experiences.

MicroView 2.5.0 alpha10 is now available from our website for win32, win64 and OSX platforms.  The Mac version no longer requires X, which is helpful if you run Mountain Lion 10.8.  There's two new plugins to try out, as well as the return of the basic bone analysis app.  Let us know what you think.  See http://www.parallax-innovations.com/microview for all download links to this pre-release version.

Over the past few years, the future of MicroView on the Mac platform was a bit grim: the only available binary was 32-bit, PPC-only, and relied on the Carbon compatibility layer. Performance was lacklustre compared to Windows and Linux releases. With the release of OS X Lion, the original distribution of MicroView on Apple hardware reportedly doesn't run at all. Jumping forward to today, however, the story is somewhat different - we've successfully ported the majority of the open-source components of MicroView to a 64-bit Intel Mac platform running OS X Lion 10.7.3. There's plenty more to do to stabilize the platform, but the majority of the technical hurdles have been crossed. See attached: a picture is worth a 1000 words.

Well, that didn't take long!  Dr. Philippe Choquet, a self-proclaimed MicroView "fanatic", wins our first blog contest for noting that in the attached image MicroView is running as a standalone 64-bit Windows application.  It's a well known limitation that MicroView on win32 is limited to loading images 840 MB or smaller, so this will be good news for memory intensive power users.  Dr. Choquet, as an aside, continues to find interesting applications for MicroView.