MacResearch

MacLearning.org and Apple, Inc. are pleased to announce the offering of four regional conferences on teaching and learning using Apple technologies. Based on the feedback from an earlier survey on travel expenses and budgets, we have jointly decided to offer four regional AcademiX 2009 conferences designed to offer opportunities for learning and sharing at minimal cost to you or your institution.

As of February 23, 2009, the PC GAMESSFirefly team is proud to announce the availability of the first official release of the PC GAMESS/Firefly package for Mac OS X/Intel platform.

List of some key features:

Free and fast! Proven reliability and performance of Windows/Linux PC GAMESS/Firefly.
Feature rich - supports all the functionality of Windows/Linux-based PC GAMESS/Firefly.

I see Apple have released the beta test version of Safari I just thought it would be useful to keep track of any problems for scientific applications.

To start off Safari breaks Xcode. If you are using the 3.0 version of Xcode, you will find that it crashes on launch once you have downloaded the Safari 4 beta. Just head over to the Apple Developer Connection to download version 3.1.2 of Xcode that works fine.

Those using Papers on the desktop and looking for a mobile solution, your wait is over. Papers 1.0 for iPhone and iPod touch has just been released in the App Store(open in iTunes). This version of Papers was released with an accompanying update to the desktop client to version 1.9 (you don't need to have the desktop version to use the iPhone/iPod version). The new version of the desktop application allows you to sync your library between your desktop and mobile device. Papers for iPhone and iPod touch is available for an introductory price of $9.99 (US).

The details from the Mekentosj press release are below.

In 'Showcase' reviews, the reviewer is the developer. No claim of objectivity is made, but it’s a chance for the developer to show off his/her app. Here, Bartas Technologies presents Transcriva, a Mac OS X application that helps you transcribe lectures, classes or other audio or video files.

Transcriva is a manual transcription tool that targets users who cannot rely on automated transcription powered by voice recognition. As a result, the application is focused sharply on providing as much “power assist” as possible in your manual transcription tasks without getting in your way.

There are a number of competitors ranging in cost and complexity (from “free” to “ouch”). The trouble with voice recognition packages is that they are still too expensive, too inaccurate, and cannot distinguish between different voices. On the opposite end of the spectrum are “solutions” which amount to little more than a basic text editor and a media player.

Transcriva sits squarely in the middle, combining features found in top-of-the-line manual dictaphones and transcription software packages with the simplicity and pricing of the more basic packages. The diverse feature set makes it an ideal tool for many different types of transcription tasks, including dictation, medical transcription, meeting minutes, video captioning, and more.

Author: Drew McCormack

Web Site: www.macflashcards.com

I’ve been using Dropbox now for a month or so, and I’ve found it a very useful tool for syncing and sharing files. It’s free, so give it a shot.

One of my favorite features is an obscure contextual menu: if you right click on a file in the Public folder of your Dropbox, there is an item called ‘Copy public link’. This makes it trivially easy to share a file with anyone. You just copy the file to the Public folder, use the contextual menu to copy the link, and paste the link in an email. This very simple piece of functionality makes my life so much easier.

Apple seem to have cottoned on to it too, because yesterday they announced a new feature which allows you to generate a public link for a file on your iDisk. While this is welcome, it still requires you to open the MobileMe web app, which is one step too many in my view. So I guess we have to wait for Snow Leopard to see the feature supported in Finder…or do we?

There really is no reason you can’t generate public links for iDisk via Finder to mimic the way Dropbox does it. All you need to do is convert the local file path into the appropriate URL for the file online. It’s not rocket science, so I took a shot at it using Automator. The rest of this post will be about how you can install the Automator workflow I came up in order to make use of the ‘Copy Public Link’ menu item. I’ll also delve into the code a little to show you how it works.

There will be an Equalizer Birds-Of-a-Feather meeting during Eurographics'09 - mark your calenders:

Place: Eurographics 2009, TU Munich
Date: March 31, 14:30-16:00

Co-located with Eurographics'09 is the Eurographics Symposium on Parallel Graphics and Visualization

For more info on Equalizer and Chrome read this interview with Stefan Eilemann.

We somehow missed this one: MacWorld.com ran a review of the recently released Mathematica 7. Conclusion?

Mathematica 7.0 continues the tradition of the past 20 years—each version sets a new standard for scientific and technical computing innovation. The integration of image processing and parallel computing tools justify the full-version-number increment, and the improved numeric, symbolic, and visualization capabilities, along with the increased data and documentation resources, enhance an already best-of-class product.

It seems the emphasis is very much on parallel computing, and rightly so, with the trend in multi-core. Good to see this being deeply integrated into Mathematica.

In 'Showcase' reviews, the reviewer is the developer. No claim of objectivity is made, but it’s a chance for the developer to show off his/her app. Here, Aaron Thompson presents a taxonomy browser for iPhone: KPCOFGS .

KPCOFGS is a biological taxonomy browser for iPhone that contains the entire ITIS database of known life forms on earth, from every kingdom and every phylum all the way down to every species. As the developer of KPCOFGS, I'd like to give a tour of my little app and also explain some of the work and decision making that went into making it what it is.

In 'Showcase' reviews, the reviewer is the developer. No claim of objectivity is made, but it’s a chance for the developer to show off his/her app. Here, Meritt Reynolds of Ripplon Software Inc. discusses BiotSavart, an application for designing experiments involving magnetism.

The purpose of BiotSavart is to facilitate the design of experiments employing magnetic fields. It does this by providing an intuitive and interactive environment in which it is easy to explore various design possibilities. You specify a three-dimensional system of conductors with specified geometry, and BiotSavart calculates quantities such as the magnetic field, force, torque, and linked flux. Visualization of the configuration with superimposed field lines, contour plots, or volumetric information promotes understanding of the system under analysis.