Hi all,
With thanks to the list moderators for letting me post: I wanted to share an early look at H5Studio, a new native HDF5 viewer from BlueQuartz Software that we’re putting the finishing touches on before release.
H5Studio isn’t meant to replace HDFView. HDFView has been a cornerstone of the HDF5 ecosystem for two decades, and many of us at BlueQuartz have relied on it ourselves for years.
What we’ve tried to build is a different option sitting alongside it — a native desktop app, built in C++, focused on quick, everyday exploration of HDF5 files.
A quick preview of what we’ve been working on:
The main window. Dataset layout, chunk dimensions, filters, and attributes live in a docked panel next to the tree so they’re always one glance away.
Right-click a dataset, pick how you want to view it, and it’s on screen. This is the workflow most of us repeat many times a day, so we wanted to make it as frictionless as we could.
Spreadsheet view with per-column precision for floating-point data — small quality-of-life thing, but nice when you’d rather see 2.1 than 2.0999999999999996.
Image view for multi-dimensional datasets, with dimension-order controls right in the toolbar.
What’s coming
We’re aiming for general availability in May 2026, on Windows, macOS (Apple Silicon and Intel), and Linux, with a 14-day free trial so you can try before buying. Pricing is on the web site.
Your feedback would be welcome.
Before we ship, we’d genuinely value input from this community. If any of what you see here looks interesting — or if there’s something in your HDF5 workflow that feels like it could be smoother — we’d love to hear about it. A short email is plenty, or you can visit https://www.bluequartz.net to sign up for release notifications.
Thanks for reading, and a sincere thanks to the HDFView team for the work they’ve put in over the years — H5Studio wouldn’t exist without the ecosystem they’ve helped build.
FAQ
- H5Studio is not opensource
- H5Studio is a paid application through a yearly subscription model
- H5Studio is cross platform (Windows, MacOS, Linux)
Mike Jackson
BlueQuartz Software