Imageio progress

[Almar Klein]

Hi All,

It's been a while since the last discussions in the imageio group. I wanted to let you know that I've still been working on imageio, and to give some sort of progress report. And I could also use some help.

I feel that the base of imageio is really taking shape, and we might move focus towards the plugins, which means more actively spreading the word about imageio and attracting developers who can help.

But before "going public", it would be very helpful if some of you could have a critical look at the design (and the code, if possible). So if you can, please at least have a look at the documentation.

Also, I would like to propose to move the project to github, in the hope to attract more developers; it seems that most scientific Python projects are on GitHub.

Over the last months I've made some significant changes to the plugin API. I've implemented a couple of plugins that deal with animated data and volumes (GIF and DICOM). This proofed to be a good way to establish how the plugin-API should look like to make it both simple and powerful. 

The user API for the Reader and Writer objects (that are returned by imageio.read() and imageio.save()): http://imageio.readthedocs.org/en/latest/classes.html.

Plugin writers should overload the Format class, and implement several well-defined private methods. Extra methods may be implemented if necessary: http://imageio.readthedocs.org/en/latest/plugins.html

Thanks,

  Almar