CellTracker new round of development Recently the SysmedIDB project (http://www.sysmedibd.eu ) has made funds available to continue with CellTracker development. The work will be carried out by Dr Chengjin Du (100%) and Dr Paul Brown (50%) at Warwick Systems Biology Centre over the next six months. Our main objectives which will be detailed further below are: code maintenance, user interface development, and involving users more closely in the development process. We hope to make significant improvements during that time but cannot stress enough that we rely on you as users to make this a success. Therefore, please forward this e-mail to any other CellTracker users you know as we have only e-mail addresses of people who registered when downloading the software themselves. To kick-off the new round of development we plan a user meeting in the last two weeks of October. A doodle poll has been initiated where you can indicate your interest and availability. Please go to ( http://doodle.com/et3rm5pcd9sy477z ). Depending on your feedback this meeting might be held in Warwick or Manchester, but we plan to travel to Manchester regularly anyhow, since there are the currently most active CellTracker users. We have created a user forum ( http://go.warwick.ac.uk/celltracker/celltracker_user_forum ) for announcements and user feedback. Again, the success of the current project will entirely depend on how active users are in participating in the discussions about future developments. In particular we would like to hear what CellTracker features you are actually using and what type of experiments you analyse. What has happened so far: CellTracker sources were transferred to a SVN repository to allow collaborative code development. We have gone through feedback from different users which was previously collated by Dave Spiller in Manchester. We are currently in the process of prioritising the individual items and dividing them up into user interface related and algorithm related problems. This will be put up on the User Forum pages for discussion. Planned work includes: Establishment of a fixed release cycle using consistent numbering scheme derived from SVN. Bundle Matlab runtime environment with CellTracker installation package. Offer installation packages for different platforms (Windows, Mac OS, Linux) Offer access to virtual machines running CellTracker on our server Create a library of different datasets including tracked data for validating and benchmarking new routines Allow users to load different set of default parameters for different types of experiments. Consider different ways to export the data to Excel. At the user meeting and in the user online forum we will extend and prioritise this list. Please feel free to reply by e-mail, but I would much rather prefer if you made use of the online forum so that we can exchange ideas with everyone. Best wishes, Till -- Dr. Till Bretschneider Reader in Systems Biology Warwick Systems Biology Centre Senate House University of Warwick Coventry CV4 7AL United Kingdom room: #344 Tel: +44 (0) 24 76 1 50252 E-mail: T.Bretschneider@warwick.ac.uk URL: http://go.warwick.ac.uk/bretschneider send large files: https://files.warwick.ac.uk/tbretschneider/sendto