Dear Mass++ users, A Happy New Year!
Here’s a brief summary of Mass++ development in the last year.
- Mass++ development continued under national scientific funds for nine years, and became an open-source software on March 20, 2015. After termination of public funding, only 3 of members are currently “active” as developers out of the 16 members of the Users Group; thus the current state of development is unstable.
- Adding to this, source codes for some plug-ins, e.g. the plug-in for raw data file-open/save function (File I/O plug-in), were not released, even though these plug-ins had been certified as “not infringing any intellectual properties of third parties.” Frankly speaking, we cannot understand why the source codes of these plug-ins were not released by the original copyright holder.
- Above all other unreleased plug-ins, the file-open function for Thermo Fisher and Agilent files have been requested by multiple users. However, because of the tight resources as mentioned above, any prompt action is, unfortunately, almost impossible at this point.
- We are planning to include the source codes of raw-datafile-open/save (File I/O) plug-ins, especially for Thermo Fisher files, into the open-source package again after March 2016. Should you require the File I/O function immediately, we recommend you use the no-fee executables of ver.2.7.4 (closed-source version), downloadable from the Shimadzu Corporation website. (See http://www.shimadzu.co.jp/aboutus/ms_r/masspp.html . There is no English-only page available for Mass++2.7.4; however, the main contents on this page are written in English.)
- At the present moment, development activity is oriented towards Japanese speaking users, as Mass++ had been developed by Japanese companies; but we plan on preparing Users/Developers manuals in English for non-Japanese-speaking users/developers. This is one of our highest-priority targets in 2016.
