Archive for February 2005

Wed, 23 February 2005

I just read a nice write up of the COOLSCOPE VS in the CAP TODAY.  Stan Schwartz of Nikon Instruments was interviewed, and I thought he gave an excellent description of many of the diverse applications the COOLSCOPE VS has, it really is quite a flexible machine.  And as you can see from the price mentioned in the article, quite a lot of bang for the buck.

I am just wrapping up our next major release of the COOLSCOPE VS software suite, and it will be on display at the USCAP show that starts this weekend.  This is a really sweet update, which includes an even simpler user interface that has a really snappy look with the use of transparency in all the right places.  Improved scanning speeds and a more streamlined workflow, it's just been used heavily by bunch of salespeople and customers over the past year and we have listened to the feedback and tweaked and or improved the software in many ways.

Thu, 17 February 2005

There is a new product brochure available for the COOLSCOPE VS online at the BLI web site.

Fri, 11 February 2005

Have you seen the new Google maps yet?

http://maps.google.com/

I find the delivery mechanism and the user interface very interesting. 

If you can operate a virtual microscopy viewer of my design, you will be very familiar using Google maps.  The map data similar to digital microscope slide data is immense and is delivered in tiles, the user can scroll around the map by clicking and dragging with the mouse.  The user can also center the view with a double click of the mouse, my viewers use a single click because I have found that some of our users have problems with a double click.  Zoom is controlled with a slide bar on the left, thus also acting as an indicator of the current zoom level.  There is currently no thumbnail or concurrent overview of the image as you navigate, but I guess they will eventually have that as well.

Interesting that they chose to deliver all this with the built in scripting engine of the browsers.  On the positive side, they don't rely on any plugin to be present on the users system, like a Java VM or Flash, but on the negative side they become very specific to certain browsers.  For instance this doesn't work on the Safari web browser on the Mac yet.