Version 0.3 (14. Feb. 1999), Tomi Engel

With this release we have reached a maturity and feature level which makes it possible to start doing real evaluation using the MassBoy applicaition. It now handles all crucial features besides the library search.

New Features in Version 0.3

Many of the missing productivity features have been added and the global behavior of the application has been finetuned. Peak background correction, time scales and relative chromatograms are the most intersting additions in this release.

• Background Correction.
  One primary scan selection will be clean from its noise peaks, reduced to the most significant peaks at each mass values and background corrected with the average of all secondary scan selections (those with the dashed lines).

• Scan selections removable.
  Clicking an existing primary or secondary scan will remove it from the selection list. Remving primary scans usually results in the removal of all related secondary scans too. This is handly if you want to get rid of marked scans before a printout or if you want to readjust a primary selection to a different position (future versions will support dragging selection marks which should offer interactive feedback).

• Spectrum panel handles multiple documents properly.
  You now can switch between documents and they spectrum panel will update accordingly. This results in an additional "bug fix" since now closing the last document really removes it from memory and clears the spectrum panel.

• Spectrum panel offers more information.
  Now we are displaying some more useful data in the spectrum panel so that printouts make more sense.

• Functional Help menu item.
  To at least give it some useful behavior clicking the "Help" menu item will now open the /LocalLibrary/Documentation/MassBoy/ folder where the available info pages should be placed.

• Functional Suggestion menu item.
  While not perfect the now available "Suggestion..:" item will request OmniWebs service to open a mailto URL. This should provide a reasonalb esolution until we have a more elegant way.

• Smarter Mass qualifiers.
  In addition to the relative chromatograms we now can handle mass ranges. So you can display spectra for e.g "41-45" or relative graphs like "71/69-73".

• Optimizations of the Spectrum view.
  Labeling of the spectrum is now smarter and the drawing is considerably faster (noticable especially during zoom operations with many peaks). While labeling is not perfect yet it sure does a reasonable job.

• Simple timescale.
  The scale axis in the chromatogram windows can now show an additional time number which is shown in addition to the scan number. While the current implementation is far from perfect it at least provides a way to work with EI and CI data which require mapping (based on time info).

• Relative chromatorgrams.
  You can generate graphs which reflect percentage values between the intensity of two different chromatograms (values range from 1 to 100). Typing "41/0" or "41/RIC" or "41%" will generate a graph for the mass 41 divided by the intensity of the RIC graph. This is helpfuls for detecting base peaks. You can also use other combinations like "41/72"

• More optimized drawing.
  The chromatogram drawing code is smarter when it comes to normalizing the graph. The new drawing code should perform significantly better¹especially on slower hardware.

• Chromatogram normalization adjustable.
  You can now decide if the chromatograms should be normalized to the highest visible value or the overall highest value. The prefs. panel offers a global switch. Later versions need to provide a more fine grained adjustment and configuration for this purpose.

• Finnigan "Magic" handling.
  The import filter knows how to handle the most common peak magics so that it won't barf on saturated peaks or the ones which lost their linearity. Their intensities are now handled correctly and mapped to internal peak quality information.

• Support for simple noise removal.
  Peaks with an intensity lower the 5000 are considered noise and don't get displayed. Future versions need a more advance noise removal mechanism and better customization.

• Support for peak quality.
  Our peaks now store some information which can provide details about the quality of the recorded data.

• Added Preferences Panel.
  We now offer a simple preferences panel were the user can adjust some global parameters which prior to that could only be adjusted by hand. Future versions need to offer a more complete set of switches and a more advanced UI.

• Smarter peak labels.
  The spectrum panel now performs a smarter peak labeling. We currently support a threshold and work with a simple"extremum-label" algorithm.

• Spectrum printable.
  The spectrum panel does support copy and print operations like the regular document windows do. While earlier versions already supported printing they did not offer automatic full page adjustment.

• Spectrum is mouse zoomable.
  Like in the document views you now can zoom into the spectrum view using a rectangle drag feature.

• Document windows do cascade.
  Loading a new document will causes it window to cascade from the current main window. This ensures intuitive multifile handling.

Bugs Fixed

Many dirty quick hacks have been cleaned up and this removed a number of print and display bugs. Some other "bugs" have been fixed but are considered feature additions and therefore are not listed here.

• Resizing window causes bad redraw.
  Changing the windows width did not cause a proper update of the view and did require a new zoom operation or a scrollbar action to trigger the redraw. Resize handling has be completely redesigned and now does it the clean way which solved a number of related problems (e.g. the print bug mentioned below).

• Drawing lines is ugly and wrong.
  The drawn lines looked ugly when printed. Drawing a white background for the zoom operation caused this trouble and with a cleaned up zoom we no longer need this dirty tricks. Now our views are prepared for overlapped graphs too.

• Printing does not reflect screen view.
  The resizing bug cause our scaled printouts to show a different data range then we had on screen. This is fixed for documents and the spectrum panel as we cleaned up the resizing code.

• Print margins too small.
  The full page printouts have been adjusted so that they are entirely visible on a DeskJet by default. The size of the margin is stored as a default value and adjustable by the user.

• Focus borders got printed.
  Focus or key views have a dashed border to make them visible but these border are not intended for printing. We now handle them correctly.

• Displaying "E00".
  Displaying the exponent did not have the "+" sign if the exponent was zeor. Now we correctly display "E+00".

• Strange line drawing.
  Printouts and on-screen drawings sometimes lost graph border lines or showed them in strange line width. A hack in the mouse-rect-zoom handling caused this problem and cleaning up the mouse-rect zoom solved related drawing bugs.

• Info Panel typo.
  There was a typo in the info panel (Spectros"k"opy). Fixed that one.

Development History

Release notes of previous versions are still available:

• Release 0.2
• Release 0.1