OpenSesame 3.1 Jazzy James is around the corner
We're approaching the next major release of OpenSesame: 3.1 Jazzy James, named after the great William James. James is still under heavy development, but things are coming together nicely. We really encourage you to give this new version a spin, as it has a lot of cool new features and improvements which we hope many of you will like - and we could really use your help for testing and feedback!
For download instructions, see the bottom of this post.
Important: OpenSesame 3.1 is under development. Expect bugs and crashes!
What's new
A new look
We're moving all of CogSci to a new, fresher look, based on Google's Material Design. For OpenSesame, this means a new icon theme (based on Moka), and sparkling colors everywhere. Parts of the user interface have also been redesigned to be more consistent.
A redesigned loop
The loop has been redesigned. It is more user friendly, and has several new features—including pseudorandomization!
And, last but not least ...
Integration with the Open Science Framework
The OSF is an online scientific project manager. You can now link OpenSesame experiments to a project on the OSF. This means that:
- You can easily share experiments with co-workers
- Data is automatically uploaded
- Experiments are automatically stored online
- Old versions of experiments can be retrieved
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Credits
Much of the credit for this release goes to Sebastiaan Mathôt ( @sebastiaan ), for all his work on revamping the OpenSesame loop item and pretty new icon theme set, but also to Daniel Schreij ( @dschreij ) for all his work on the Open Science Framework integration and the new in-app notification system.
Credit also goes to the Center for Open Science, who have largely funded this work through their OpenSesame - OSF integration grant.
Download and installation
Windows package
A prerelease package is available for Windows, and can be downloaded from here:
pip
If you have a Python environment, you can also install OpenSesame through pip:
pip install python-opensesame
pip install python-pygaze # for PyGaze
pip install opensesame-extension-osf # For the OSF extension
Anaconda
If you use the Anaconda (or Miniconda) Python distribution, you can install OpenSesame and all dependencies through the CogSci channel. The following commands install all packages into a separate Anaconda environment:
conda config --add channels cogsci
conda env create cogsci/opensesame
activate OpenSesame
conda install opensesame-windows-launcher
For more information, see:
Ubuntu PPA
Ubuntu users can get the prerelease packages from the smathot/opensesame-james ppa:
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:smathot/opensesame-james
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install opensesame python-pygaze
The OSF extensions isn't yet available through this PPA, but you can install it through pip:
pip install opensesame-extension-osf
Known issues
We are working hard to make OpenSesame as 'unicode safe' as possible, meaning that special (non-ascii) characters which OpenSesame encounters should not result in crashes or other sorts of undesired behavior. Nevertheless, there are still some situations which we have not been able to account for, largely because other third-party libraries that we use contain the non-unicode-safe code that cause the problems.
A known issue caused by unicode incompatibility is that multiprocessing does not work if OpenSesame is installed at a path containing special characters. A work around for now is to change to the inprocess running mode, but we hope to solve this problem as soon as possible.
If you bump into any other problems regarding this test version (unicode or other), we would really like to know so we can fix them. Please report any bugs or other inconsistencies at OpenSesame's issue tracker on Github
Comments
Wow! sounds amazing! thank you guys so much for always improving OS!
It sounds great !
I've just noticed that a new PyGaze package (0.4) has been released, including new Tobii controler methods. Do you think it would be integrated in James ?
Best regards,
"Lazy Chris"
OpenSesame includes PyGaze 0.6, which is (much) newer than 0.4. What makes you think that there is something new in 0.4 that isn't part of 0.6?
Check out SigmundAI.eu for our OpenSesame AI assistant!