Dear MITK devs, we released the latest MITK version 2018.04.2 in March. You find the news and release notes on our website (mitk.org) but we would also like to pitch some developer highlights compared to v2016.11 on this mailing list.
Please tell us if there is another topic you want to read more about it. Topics in this mail are - MITK superbuild & Qt - macOS - VTK 8.1 and OpenGL 3.x - Dark theme and adaptive icon colors - New MITK extension mechanism * MITK superbuild & Qt * Sometimes it's the small things that make a difference: We simplified the MITK superbuild. Are you tired of hinting our build system to the location of Qt and that is the only thing you have to do besides clicking options? - Good news, as long as you installed Qt in one of the default locations that are suggested by the Qt Online Installer, our build script automatically finds the best matching version of Qt. We also improved the early detection of missing dependencies. So, if something is missing to build MITK, the MITK superbuild configuration should detect this more reliably now. By the way, want to increase build speed? - Give Ninja + Clang a chance. * macOS * We admit it. MacOS usually gives us a hard time and as you may know, in MITK v2016.11 we had some extraordinary hard to find bugs that even lead to the decision to provide Windows and Linux installers only. We're happy to tell you that we are back on track and MITK v2018.04 is available again for all three major desktop platforms. * VTK 8.1 and the new OpenGL backend * Of all third-party toolkit upgrades, this is probably the most noticeable as we're now using the modern OpenGL 3.x backend of VTK. While this is something many of us looked forward to have for quite some time, this also means that your GPU should be, well, not super-old. We found that some CPU-integrated GPUs from around 2012 do not work, while the GPUs of the two remaining big players aged quite well. Also some virtual machine solutions may refuse to create such an OpenGL context, in which case you can usually workaround by installing a recent version of the Mesa 3D Graphics Library and render - surprisingly fast - in software. * Dark Theme and adaptive icon colors* Technically not a typical developer topic and we're sure you already saw it or at least heared about it: The MITK Workbench is dark-themed by default. But, there is more. We also implemented adaptive icon colors in SVG-icons. See the migration guide [1] for details * New MITK extension mechanism * You can develop rather differently with MITK like some of you forked our repository, others used MITK as a library with CMake, and then there are the MITK-ProjectTemplate people brave enough to do a super-super-build. We noticed that most MITK developers actually just want to extend the MITK Workbench by a module or plugin. If that is you, there is some good news. We - sorry for slang - pimped our build system to blend in code from other locations as if it would be part of the MITK source tree. Basically you can now maintain your own, separate, nice and tidy repository with just your components and when building MITK you specify your code's location in the MITK_EXTENSION_DIRS CMake cache variable. We completely restructured the MITK-ProjectTemplate to use the new extension mechanism and to provide examples for modules, plugins, and other third-party dependencies. Check it out [2]. We're also considering to move special-interest parts of MITK to separate repositories to reduce the build time for the majority of MITK devs. [1] http://mitk.org/wiki/Migration_Guide [2] https://github.com/MITK/MITK-ProjectTemplate
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