Version 0.4 (23. Feb. 1999), Tomi Engel

Whenever we come up with new ideas or receive useful suggestions we will place them here so that everybody can see where the road should take us. The placement under a special release version is just a rough timeframe idea and not a commitmet to really delivering it.

Planned Features for Version 0.5

Some companies would call this a final 1.0 Release but I feel that this is just halfway to the finished project. However, with those features we can consider it a very useful application:

• More advanced mass handling.
  In general mass trace handling should be better then now. This means that we should be able to distinguish between 41.0 and 41.00. This would affect background correction, chromatogram generation and many other areas. But we will need more preferences for this!

• More data optimizations.
  We will have to do some more optimizations to make the app more usable on large datasets. We should handle datafiles with 10 MB of size and approx 2000 scans per experiment. The Finnigan filter needs some more work so that caching will be more efficient. This includes another "memory leak" test.

• Use float for Intensities.
  This is more of an internal thing...but we will switch to using float values as peak intensities so that we are less likely to run into trouble in the future (should use up the same amount of memory).

• Graph export.
  Being able to export chromatograms and spectras in a file format besides EPS is a "most wanted" feature that should be easy to support.

• Advanced time scale.
  The ugly way of v 0.3 needs adjustment to show nice and useful time intervals. This includes a check of the interscan time for relevance.

• Better keyboard UI.
  We need to support all sort of DEL, cursor, TAB, shift etc. pp. combinations as requested by the guidelines.

• Loadable components.
  We need components so that we could add new input and output filters on the fly. This is a must to release the apps source since the current data modules can not be handed out to the public domain and therefore need to be seperated.

• UI redesign.
  Some major redesigns of the UI could be interesting and necessary. This includes more layout details and font or color customization.

Planned Features for Version 1.0

The "real thing" should have all these capabilities:

• Optimizations all over the place.
  By this time the feature set should be fairly complete and we might turn to optimizations of data generation, in the drawing code and object allocation/deallocation.

• Real printing.
  Printing should scale to current paper size and the list view and spectra results should print smoothly as well. We currently do print some data but this is far from doing the perfect job.

• Chromatograms rearragnable.
  Sort automatically or allow CRTL-drag for manual resorting.

• Check class names.
  Some internal classes and methods do not match our naming schema. Especially those which are named "spectra" should actually be turned to "chromatogram" classes.

• More Loadable components.
  Some additional sections of the app might get "outsourced" to components and become loadable extensions thus enhancing the modularity of the application.

Features Whishlist

These are the ideas which have been submitted by users or came to mind during development. Time will tell how or when these features will get implemented. But at least you can see what direction we are heading for.

• Advanced Chromatogram display.
  It would be nice to be able to stack multiple chromatograms so that they would take up little screen estate and could be compared in an easy visula overlay mode.

• Multiple experiments per window.
  There should be a way to get multiple experiments into one window (document) and work on them side by side. This will have the benefit that scrolling will be performed on both at the same time and therefore peak matching and similar comparison should be a lot easier.

• Reverse library search.
  Instead of having the user search for intersting areas the system could "presearch" an experiment and try to identify molecules which are very likely. This could result in a list of notes which point the user to already prechecked sections. This feature requires database search and annotation features. It could try to find sections which have some recognizable "peak" characteristics and which differ from the regular noise level.

• Advanced Library support.
  Part of the new components could provide support for different spectra databases and different matching algorithms.

• Less waste of screen estate.
  Perhaps some switches could enable the user to customize the UI so that more information can be placed on the screen (or just add a second CTR and graphics card ;-).