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Roadmap

Who this page is for. Readers who want a short, public view of what Tether is shipping, what comes next, and where its scope stops. This page summarizes the internal product requirements; it does not duplicate the frozen schema or parameter tables. Use the project-store reference and analysis-parameter reference for those contracts.

Current release

v1.0.0-rc1 is the current public version. It is the release candidate for the first stable Tether release; stable v1.0.0 has not been tagged yet. The release candidate collects the completed M0–M8 capability milestones and the M9 packaging and documentation work that is now being hardened for release.

The stable v1.0.0 scope is:

  • a provenance-first .tether project store that keeps every trace linked to its source movie, coordinates, corrections, annotations, idealization, and analysis settings;
  • native two-color, single-laser TIRF movie extraction, plus round-trip Deep-LASI and tMAVEN interchange;
  • photophysical correction, keyboard-driven curation, condition-aware ranking, batch processing, and provenance-stamped exports;
  • one-click tMAVEN-sidecar idealization and seven native population-analysis views, backed by the project's validation oracles; and
  • cross-platform packaging with frozen environments, checksums, an SBOM, and versioned documentation. See Installers & offline bundle for current platform and signing details.

Next planned work

The next release step is to finish M9 and tag stable v1.0.0: exercise the bundled installers and validation suite end to end, finish release hardening, and publish the installer assets, environment locks, checksums, SBOM, and versioned documentation through the release pipeline.

There is no committed v1.1 feature slate yet. Post-1.0 work will be selected through the public issue backlog after the stable-release gates are complete; deferred ideas are not promises until they have an accepted work item and milestone.

Explicit non-goals

These boundaries apply to v1.0 and are deliberate:

  • No ALEX/PIE, stoichiometry, or three-color analysis. Tether v1 is for two-color, single-laser acquisitions.
  • No built-in data simulator. Validation uses real labeled traces and named benchmark data instead.
  • No attempt to clone every tMAVEN plot. Seven plot types are native; other tMAVEN views remain available through the standalone hand-off.
  • No open-ended legacy-format support. Deep-LASI inputs and tMAVEN SMD are supported; older .dat and vbFRET .mat formats are not.
  • No central Tether service. The application runs on each user's workstation and projects remain on storage chosen by the lab.

For acquisition-level limits and supported inputs, read Does Tether fit my data?.

Milestone history

Each milestone was designed to leave a runnable, tested application rather than a partial layer. Annotated repository tags record the public checkpoints.

Milestone Public checkpoint What it established
M0 — Foundation v0.0.0 Project store and schema freeze, application shell, pinned environments, CI, and repository governance.
M0.5 — De-risking Validation gate before v0.1.0 tMAVEN-sidecar interchange/parity and Deep-LASI extraction/registration feasibility.
M1 — Extraction core v0.1.0 Movie-to-trace extraction, calibration/registration, and the headless extraction path.
M2 — MVP v0.2.0 Trace↔movie browsing, curation provenance, idealization hand-off, locking, and first analysis views.
M3 — Corrections v0.3.0 Photobleaching, leakage and gamma correction, stale-result handling, and resumable batch processing.
M4 — Annotation v0.4.0 Structured cross-file conditions, editable categories, and audited condition correction.
M5 — Curation + ML v1 v0.5.0 Persistent condition-aware ranking, active-learning cues, drift checks, and multi-curator label merging.
M6 — Analysis suite v0.6.0 Population models, seven-plot parity, kinetics, raw-FRET views, and provenance-stamped exports.
M7 — Legacy importers v0.7.0 Full Deep-LASI reconstruction and analysis-only tMAVEN SMD intake.
M8 — ML v2 v0.8.0 Optional isolated GPU/deep-classifier stack and kinetics-benchmark integration.
M9 — Packaging & docs v1.0.0-rc1 (current) Bundled installers, release automation, validation, and the public documentation set; stable v1.0.0 is next.