[RASMB] Announcement (1) UltraScan-3 release

[Borries Demeler]

Dear Colleagues,

I am happy to announce the official release of our new UltraScan-III
software. Version 1.0 will be available for download on September 1,
2011. For more information and to download a pre-release version 
please visit http://www.ultrascan.uthscsa.edu

UltraScan-III represents 4 years of effort from our lab, with
contributions (in alphabetical order) from:

UTHSCSA/UTSA:
	Emre Brookes, Weiming Cao, Bruce Dubbs, Gary Gorbet, Jeremy Mann,
	Dan Zollars

Indiana University:
	Suresh Marru, Marlon Pierce, Raminder Singh

IST, Genova, Italy:
   Mattia Rocco
	
UltraScan-III replaces the UltrAScan-II AUC analysis suite and is
designed to be used together with the UltraScan-III LIMS infrastructure,
but unlike UltraScan-II, it can also be used without database, supercomputing
or network access as a standalone desktop application.

UltraScan-III is a complete re-write of our previous UltraScan-II
suite with MANY improvements addressing user friendliness, performance and
flexibility. It has been redesigned from the ground up to allow seamless
integration with a MySQL database LIMS system, TeraGrid supercomputing
capability, and is built upon the next generation Qt-4, a platform
independent C++ framework.

In addition to analysis modules and utilities available in UltraScan-II,
we have added many new featureas, including a desktop version of the
popular 2-dimensional spectrum analysis, which no longer requires a
supercomputer backend (but benefits greatly from now common multi-core
architectures), a completely new GUI system to facilitate editing,
processing and analyzing data, improvements in network security,
a rotor calibration program, meniscus fitter, and report manager for
customized reporting of the results, a generalized and abstracted model
system for representing virtually any model, including reacting models,
compressibility, flotation, non-ideality and co-sedimenting solutes.

UltraScan-III is licensed under the GPL software and available in source
code format.  As before, we provide Linux, Windows and Macintosh binaries,
and free access to the LIMS and supercomputing infrastructure hosted on XSEDE
(the successor to TeraGrid).

At this time, completion of documentation, tutorials and training videos
is work in progress. Please monitor our website for updates on this
ongoing effort. Version 1.0 to be released on Thursday next week will
already contain a complete set of features for sedimentation velocity
analysis.

UltraScan-II users: We will continue to support UltraScan-II and
USLIMS-II, however, there will not be any further development of that
release. All new features will be added to UltraScan-III. New users
should start with UltraScan-III, previous users should switch to using
UltraScan-III. For those of you with LIMS-II data we will continue
to offer access to all LIMS instances for the forseeable future.
UltraScan-III is NOT backward compatible with UltraScan-II.

We invite interested developers to participate in the open source 
development of UltraScan. We welcome your suggestions for improvements
and bug reports. For more information, please visit our website
or contact me.

Best regards, -Borries
---
Borries Demeler, Ph.D.
Associate Professor
The University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio
Dept. of Biochemistry, MC 7760
7703 Floyd Curl Drive, San Antonio, Texas 78229-3901
Voice: 210-767-3332, Fax: 210-567-1136, Email: demeler at biochem.uthscsa.edu