Features to 0.3 release

[sofroniewn]

🚀 Feature

This issue has some features moved over from our 0.2 release #301. They are considered more advanced topics that we'll likely be aiming to have explored or supported for our 0.3 release, which might be around Jun 1 2020.

Dims features:

• Enable range mode for dims including slice / max_projection / crop (S/P/C)
• Add play button to dimension sliders.
• Support units in status update and scaler bar overlays
• Add axes labels
• Add axes shapes

File I/O:

• Loading / saving shapes, points, vectors
• Loading / saving surface
• Loading custom image file types
• Loading / saving entire viewer state to zarr

Rendering

• 3D rendering of big data + image pyramids
• 3D interactivity / drawing
• Support mixed 2D and 3D rendering
• Editing in labels pyramid
• Lazy rendering

1D plots

• Scatter, line, histogram plots
• Live updating, with links

Colors / clims:

• For image layer add a clims histogram
• Add a colorbar

Animations:

• Support for making animations.

Layers:

• Support layer borders Image borders #298
• Support draggable / resizable layers Draggable and resizable image layers #299
• Add text layer Text layer #593
• add events on finishing adding shapes / markers / labels / refresh etc

Multicanvas:

• Support multiple canvas with linked cameras
• For grid mode + coupled zoom
• Minimap when highly zoomed in
• For XY, XZ, YZ + 3D views for people doing volumetric imaging

Provenance logging

• Undo / redo buttons
• History feature
• Macro generation

Qt / stylings

• autogenerate _qt_properties / _qt_controls from function annotations
• display loading icon during start-up
• Make side panels draggable, dockable
• Support title bar (with editable title and proper stylings)
• Status bar shows values from multiple layers
• Add edit boxes next to sliders to set min / max

Typing / schema

• Add typing system for images / shapes
• Adopt a metadata schema compatible with xarray for images / shapes

Remote access

• remote notebooks
• web viewing
• remote data with dask
• ability to launch from jupyterhub with jupyterlab

Standalone app

• Installable app made with PyInstaller

Testing

• add performance benchmarks
• add better UI tests

Tutorials and docs

• better demo datasets with pooch
• more application tutorials

[AhmetCanSolak]

Hi @sofroniewn , how are you feeling about moving add play button to dimension sliders to 0.2.0 milestone? I can work on it after #520 and #496.

[GenevieveBuckley]

Does "Support mixed 2D and 3D rendering" have an issue I can follow?

I often have a 3D volume (fluorescence microscopy), and a 2D image (scanning electron microscopy) from the same sample. It'd be really awesome if I could overlay the two.

They generally have very different angles of view from the detector to the sample, as well as very different pixel sizes which makes things kinda tricky.

[jni]

Does "Support mixed 2D and 3D rendering" have an issue I can follow?

A quick search didn't turn up any, so feel free to create one. @sofroniewn has already done some of the leg-work here by allowing layers to have their own dims (dimensions) model, separate from the global one, so I think this one is less of an implementation and more of a UX challenge.

Layers can also have their own scaling and translation. In terms of e.g. 3D rotations or skew, I don't think we have a great story there yet, but I'm not sure.

If you could provide a small sample dataset, that would help enormously with development.

[sofroniewn]

We're well underway moving towards these goals, and closing out some of the remaining issues from #301. I just wanted to highlight a couple key areas of work that we need to get done before we get close to having API stability, and having a solid foundation for plugins:

• Use of colors / colormaps on models Improve multiple colors behavior in relevant layers  #782, Generic colormap representation #862

• Points vs Text vs Annotation refactor and propagation of changes to Shapes, Vectors Refactor Points data model #858

• 1D plot widgets + live updating [WIP] 1D PlotWidget #823

• More interactivity on the base layer Add basic interactivity to the base layer #772

• Physical coordinates Physical coordinate systems #763

• Camera state / viewer serialization camera model #852 and [WIP] serialize viewer #851

• Finalizing keybindings, mouse bindings, event systems generalize keybindings #791 Better generalize mouse functions #793

• Crop / project / slice mode What is the best solution for cropping feature #848, Idea: button right of each slider toggles 'max projection'  #7

• Multicanvas support (linked ortho views, linked grid view) Linked multicanvas support #760

• FileIO for all layer types File IO #379

• Improve remote data support, remote dask server (?) Make changing views non-blocking #845 [WIP] remote viewer with dask #654

[liu-ziyang]

going to close this issue now since we have past 0.3 release cycles, future features will be tracked in 0.4+ release notes