Getting started

Installation

Shape-Out 2 can be installed via multiple channels.

  1. Windows installer: Download the latest version for your architecture (i.e. Shape-Out_X.Y.Z_win_64bit_setup.exe) from the official release page.

  2. macOS: Download the latest version (Shape-Out_X.Y.Z.dmg or Shape-Out_X.Y.Z.pkg) from the official release page.

  3. Python 3.8 with pip: Shape-Out can easily be installed with pip:

    python3 -m pip install shapeout2

    To start Shape-Out, simply run python3 -m shapeout2 or shapeout2 in a command shell.

Update

Shape-Out automatically searches for updates (you may opt-out via the Help menu) and notifies the user when a new version is available.

  1. Windows installer: The older version of Shape-Out will be automatically uninstalled when installing a new version.

  2. macOS: The older version of Shape-Out will be automatically uninstalled when installing a new version.

  3. Python 3.8 and pip:

    pip install --upgrade shapeout2

Supported data file formats

Shape-Out 2 exclusively supports the .rtdc data file format. This file format is based on the HDF5 format which makes it portable, consistent, and efficient.

If you have .tdms-based datasets (created using antique versions of Shape-In), you can still use the data after you have converted them to .rtdc files using DCKit, which provides a convenient GUI for several other RT-DC data management tasks as well. The .rtdc file format is faster than the .tdms file format, occupies less disk space, and consists of only one file per measurement.

If you have raw .rtdc files that only contain the recorded images and no extracted events, you can perform segmentation and feature extraction using ChipStream.

How to cite

If you use Shape-Out in a scientific publication, please cite it with:

Paul Müller and others (2019), Shape-Out version 2.X.X: Graphical user interface for analysis and visualization of RT-DC data sets [Software]. Available at https://github.com/ZELLMECHANIK-DRESDEN/ShapeOut2.

If the journal does not accept and others, you can fill in the missing names from the credits file.