Dear users, Happy New Year!

The last entry on this blog was the summary of Mass++ development in 2015. Here we summarize Mass++ development in the last year, 2016! 😛

New strategy

  • Our most severe and fundamental problem, the shortage of developers, has yet to be solved. We thus decided to change our development priority and strategy as follows;

(1) There will no longer be any new development for reading files in vendor’s new native format.

  • This does NOT mean that the future Mass++ cannot open files in vendor’s native formats. It simply means that we will no longer develop any ORIGINAL functions for reading files in new native formats. We will utilize the open-source software ProteoWizard for the development of native-file-open functions.

(2) We will be shifting towards UNIX version development.

  • UNIX and its compatible OS environments are currently the de facto standard (For PCs, Mac OS X is an Apple-modified version of BSD, a distribution of UNIX, and Linux is an UNIX-compatible OS. For smartphone/tablets, iOS is a simplified version of Mac OS X, and Android, the most majority, is a Google-modified version of Linux). Development on UNIX (and its compatible OS) is a bit suitable for developments crossing the Internet.
  • New versions may actually be implemented in Java language, which results in easy-generation of multiple versions for multiple OS environments.

Development in 2016

  • Last year (2016), we have continued our development primarily according to the strategies mentioned above:
  • First, we generated the “build manual” (the manual describing the development environment) and is currently published on the OSDN site.
  • Second, we developed a peak picking plug-in utilizing a function of an open-source software OpenMS; unfortunately some bugs remain, thus this plug-in is still unreleased.
  • New logos, icons and symbol marks were introduced in addition (those maybe our greatest improvement in 2016. 😛 ).
MS_icon_128
MS_icon-1_300 x 74

This year’s Development Plan

This year (2017), we will release “Mass++: 10th Anniversary Version,” a development version (ver.3), of which the development environment is Visual Studio 2015 instead of VS 2010. During 2017, bug-fixed plug-ins will be added in this package, assuring the final version to be a stable version and the last release, as ver.3.

Concurrently, an UNIX version will be developed – which will become ver.4.

Finally… we will try to write the developer’s manual. Is it possible??