ImageJ will celebrate its tenth anniversary in September of this year. These past 10 years have seen the Javabased open-source software mature into an invaluable laboratory tool. In addition to its impressive functionality, this cutting-edge image-processing tool has an indispensable support community of enthusiasts on the ImageJ mailing list.

Wayne Rasband is the core author of ImageJ; after developing the Macintoshbased National Institutes of Health (NIH) Image for 10 years, he made the brave decision of starting afresh with ImageJ using the Java programming language. By shifting to Java, Rasband liberated the software from an individual operating system. To run ImageJ, a given system needs only the operating system-specific Java runtime environment. Java runtime environments (JRE) are freely available, either from Sun or bundled with platformspecific installations of ImageJ (rsb. info. nih. gov/ij). With JRE available for most operating systems, ImageJ is platform-independent, running on Macintosh, Windows, Linux, and even a PDA operating system. The new 64-bit operating systems and their JRE have happily broken the long-held 1.7 Gb memory limit for Java applications. One of the downsides of the Java heritage is an interface that may feel a little unfamiliar. However, a few steps into ImageJ, and this minor inconvenience is forgotten. While Rasband is the author of the core program, an extensive group of additional developers has written and made available a growing arsenal