MacResearch

Author: Charles Parnot

I would like to point out a recent review of the iPad, specifically geared towards scientists and researchers. The author of the review details his experience with the iPad in the context of his work as an academic, and lists a number of applications he has found useful in that context. Let us know what you think of the iPad in the context of your work.

Drew McCormack

I presented a 6 hour workshop at the NSConference developer meetings recently, covering new technologies in Snow Leopard such as Grand Central Dispatch and OpenCL. This workshop was recorded as a video course over 3 days, and is now available for download from Mac Developer Network.

As my grant writing has ramped up over the years, I've gradually brought my workflow over to the iWork suite and found it much more satisfying than in the Office world. Surprisingly, there are no resources on the internet providing tips and tricks for research grant writing on a Mac, so I thought I'd share the things that I use and how it gets me to the end product with minimal fuss.

An announcement provided by Kevin Theisen. ChemDoodle 3 has been released! Over the last year, we have been working with many individuals from academia and industry to further improve ChemDoodle. Our hard work has resulted in a complete overhaul of the application.

In September, 2009, as part of the Cocoa for Scientists series, I wrote an article on developing a physics-based game on the iPhone called Sumo Master. At the recent NSConference meetings in the UK and US, I gave a one hour presentation based on the article. Video of the talk is now available for purchase via the Mac Developer Network web site.

As someone who has spent most of their career in the Pharmaceutical industry I am too well aware how support for the Mac can be limited. So I was delighted to be at the Dotmatics UGM and see top level support for Mac (and Linux).

By Drew McCormack

Like most scientific developers, I've used statically-typed programming languages like Fortran and C++ for most of my professional life. But the last few years I have moved more and more of my coding to dynamic languages like Python and Objective-C, and I have come to prefer dynamic typing to static typing. I am by no means alone in this, with a trend to languages like Ruby and Python in fields as varied as web applications development and scientific data mining.

The reason for this post is that I have been reading the new Pragmatic Programmer's book Code in the Cloud by Mark C. Chu-Carroll, which provides an introduction to cloud computing with Google App Engine. On the whole, it's not a bad introductory text, but one aspect of it riles me: it denigrates Python, and dynamically-typed languages, in general. In 2010, I find this position quaint to say the least. In 1998, it would have been the status quo, but to find an author who still thinks like this about web development is surprising, especially given that Google App Engine is a poster child for dynamic scripting languages in the cloud.

There are not many tools out there to help you deal with Xgrid, and we know from experience here at MacResearch that people new to Xgrid have a hard time finding good resources.

Apple and MacLearning.org's one day conference for academic institutions — AcademiX — will take place again on May 14, 2010. This year, the conference will run simultaneously at eight different institutions across the USA, including MIT, Northwestern University, Duke University, Princeton University, San Diego State University, The University of Kansas, University of Minnesota, and University of New Mexico.

Not only will the campuses be virtually linked for the event, but those unable to attend in person can follow along via Apple's streaming webcast system. And it's all free.

Presentations this year include "This is How We Think: Learning in Public After the Paradigm Shift" by Paul Hammond and Richard Miller, who stole the show at last year's event with their highly-choreographed, media-rich presentation, and several other presentations on the challenges facing scholarly publication in the digital era.

To learn more about the presentations, and to register, visit our sister site MacLearning.org.

KNIME, the Konstanz Information Miner, is a visual platform for graphically building and editing workflows and data analysis pipelines from defined components called nodes. KNIME is developed in Prof. Michael Berthold's group at the University of Konstanz, Germany. It can be downloaded for free from www.knime.org.