iVision-Mac 4.5 Release Notes
Whatʼs New in iVision-Mac 4.5.0
iVision 4.5 is the first Intel-native version of iVision. It includes the following changes andfeatures:
Faster Processing on Intel
Here are the times for a simple image processing script that reads 20 indexed files, changes them,and writes them back to a different folder:
G5 (2.3GHz)
MacPro (3GHz)
iVision 4.0
19 seconds
21
iVision 4.5
1810Note that camera frame rates are not noticeably improved. The faster processing speeds may speedup scripts that do other processing during the capture loop, though.
PCIe support on Intel
Cameras which use PCI-Express (PCIe) boards are now supported on Intel-based machines.
Scripts and non-device preferences are not convertible.
Sorry about that.
File/Image names: 255 Unicode characters
Unicode allows the use of "international" (non-Roman alphabet) characters (e.g. Japanese).
There are some items where Unicode is still not fully supported including:Row and Column Labels
Drawing Text
To fully support these a new file format will have to be developed, because the older IPLab format
does not store these items in Unicode.
New dialog window name field & resizable dialogs.
The window name field in dialogs is now a single edit field with a menu to the right of it. Themenu includes "relative" window names that let you refer to windows based on their position, foruse in scripts. The relative names are drawn in italics. To put in a specific name (e.g. "DAPIImage"), pick from the menu, or just type into the field and any italic name will go away.

Since window names can potentially be very long now, dialogs that contain window name fields
can be resized horizontally to see the full name.

Commands
More commands allow you to specify the image to use.
All commands that reference image windows now include a window name field, rather than only
working with the front image. This should make scripting easier, since you don't have to worry as
much about which image is at the front.
Open As replaced by enhanced Open command.
The "Open As" command let you tell iVision what format a file was (e.g. TIFF or PICT), so if thefile had the wrong extension or file type associated with it you could still open the file. Since it
was not used much and seemed to confuse people more than it helped them, the "Open As" hasbeen removed. It's functionality has been included in the "Open" command.
To keep "Open" simple to use, the default file format is set to "Automatic". This will figure out theformat of the file for you and open the image if it is in any format that iVision knows.
The "Automatic" format should be used in almost all cases.
The best reason to use a specific format is when using a script to open a large number of images
that are all the same format but do not have an extension or other file type (e.g. from an old OS 9CD). In that case telling iVision the format will speed up the file reading.

Open Multiple Files at once, interactively.
The Open command allows you to select more than one file at a time interactively. This is not
scriptable.

File Sets are just Indexed and Folder (no more List).
Segmentation sets gone.
You can just place the segmentation command into the script without creating a segmentation set.
This required that the number of colors saved for the Color Cube feature be limited to a maximumof 20.
Pseudocolor dialog expanded:
The "Predefined" menu is reduced to the "complex" color ramps, like Rainbow, Classify, andSystem, as well as the commonly used "Monochrome" and "Reverse Mono".
There are also two new options to create simple color ramps:

The menu to the right of the ramp choices lists "single color" color definitions (e.g. Red, Green,Blue, Cyan, etc.). You can add to this list with the new "Define Colors" command.

Edit CLUT replaced with Define Colors:
The Define Colors command lets you specify a single color and give it a name:

The dialog show what a darkfield and brightfield ramp made from this color will look like. If there
is an image open when this dialog is open, you can apply either of the ramps to the image to see
how they look. You can also step through the frames of the image to preview what the change will
look like.
The colors defined in this command are also available in FCV when assigning colors to images in
the Color Join command.

Changes toVariables
For the most part variables still work the same as before. You still use a number with the "Var"button in a dialog to specify a variable.
But the Variables window has changed from an image window to a palette:

In this window the name of the variable is preceded by a lower case "v".
The Variable window only shows those variables that have been used at some point (and have notbeen removed). You can change the value of a variable in this window by clicking on the Valuecolumn and typing a new value. In addition, variables can contain text as well as numbers.

Updated Set Variables dialog.
The Set Variables dialog includes several ways to place text into variables:• A new "Text" option to set any arbitrary text string.
• A "Window Name" option to place the name of an existing window into a variable.
• The "Acquire Info" menu now includes non-numeric fields such as Filter Names and dates,
which will be placed into the variable as a text string.

Updated Enter Variables dialog.
The Enter Variables dialog has been updated to add some formatting features, and to allow text tobe entered into variables:

When the script is run, the result looks like this:Using Variables in Text Fields
To use any variable (numeric or text) in a text field, you use a special formatting rule that lets you
insert the value of the variable into the text.

Place the name of the variable inside braces: {v123}.
You can optionally use one of two formatting options for numbers: zero fill, or decimal places.
For zero fill you can specify a total length of 2 to 6 digits.
For decimal places you can specify 0 through 6 digits after the decimal place.
You specify the option by following the variable name with a comma and then a 'z' or a 'd',followed by the number.
Example:if v42 = 12.547000000[v42}[v42,z2}[v42,z3}[v42,z4}[v42,z5}[v42,z6}[v42,d0}[v42,d1}[v42,d2}[v42,d3}[v42,d4}[v42,d5}[v42,d6}

=> 12
=> 12
=> 012=> 0012=> 00012=> 000012=> 13=> 12.5=> 12.55=> 12.547=> 12.5470=> 12.54700=> 12.547000(truncate)(truncate)(truncate)(truncate)(truncate)(truncate)(round)(round)(round)(round)(round)(round)(round)You can put more than one variable substitution in a text field.
For example, if v10 = 4, and v12 = 32.4112:"Experiment {v10,z3} temperature: {v12,d1} F" would produce:"Experiment 004 temperature: 32.4 F".
Variable substitution is available in:Window Names
Draw Text:
text
Enter Variables: title, description, prompt(s) [for Enter Var and Title uses]
Script Query:
title, message, button titles
Script Alert:
title, message

Scripts:
The Script window has been updated. It is resizable horizontally.

The END symbol now acts like a label,: you can jump to END without adding a label just above it.
The Comment column can be toggled to show the parameters in the command:

At the moment this is more confusing than helpful because the description shows every possible
field even if they aren't in use, and in a hard to read format. This will be improved in the future.

The search field at the top of the window will highlight any commands that contain the given text:

In this example the File Set named "Iris Frames" is used by two commands "Use File Set" and"Open". The command name, the user comment, and the parameters are all searched for the given
text. The search field remembers the last 10 searches:

The script commands palette includes two new commands: Enable and Disable.

These commands allow you to disable commands in a script, which causes them to be skipped
over, as if they weren't in the script at all. Disabled commands are displayed in red:

Scripts remember different size/placement than interactive dialogs.
If you are scripting a command where you want the dialog to be opened while the script is running(with the "+"), the size and position of the dialog used when the script is run will be saved
independently from the size and position used when not running a script. So you can reliably place
the dialog at a specific place on screen.

Miscellaneous:
New File Extensions for iVision files:
iVision Script.ivsc
iVision Preference.ivpr
iVision Extension.ivex
iVision Device Module .ivdm
About Box:
The About Box contains a popup menu which shows the name and version of all Extensions inuse. This does not include device modules, which are listed in the Device Setup dialog.
At the bottom of the popup menu is "Reveal in Finder", which will open a Finder window for thefolder which contains the currently running iVision. This helps verify which copy of iVision isrunning (if there is more than one on the machine),

The Device Setup dialog has an Open Folder button to show the current Device Modules folder.