ANN: imageio v1.0

[Almar Klein]

> Thanks for the announcement!  Can you expand on how you see the
> eco-system of scikit-image, imread and imageio interacting?

Since imageio has a pretty good plugin system, it could be a good place 
to implement io for all the weird scientific file formats that exist. 
Next to imread(), volread(), etc. imageio also provides the read() 
function, which returns a reader object specific to the plugin. This 
reader object can have additional methods and may yield other data then 
just 2D/3D numpy arrays if this makes sense for the format.

So I suppose I am hoping for skimage devs to embrace imageio and help 
move it further.

With that, I suppose skimage could focus on the processing rather than 
the io, since ideally, we'd have one library for processing images, and 
one for reading/saving images.

<rant>
Developers tend to have a fear for dependencies. I understand this, and 
I try to minimize dependencies myself, but reading/writing images is a 
task that warrants a standalone package IMO. It troubles me a bit that 
different libraries are each rolling their own image io  functionalities.
</rant>

As for the imread package: Zach and I considered it when discussing 
plans for imageio, but imread is based on C++, which is harder to 
maintain and makes it a harder dependency. imageio is pure Python with 
ctypes bindings to some libs that are auto-downloaded.

- Almar

PS: some fancy stuff that imageio can do which might be interesting for 
skimage users: stream images from webcam, export visualizations to 
animated gif or mp4.