MacResearch

As many of you are heading back to campus to start a new quarter or semester, I thought it would be timely to post a link to Mashable's guide to Mac Apps for Productivity. I'm happy to see that some of my favorite productivity apps, such as Things and Dropbox, made the list. If you know of any science-oriented productivity apps (e.g. lab notebooks) that didn't make Mashable's list, please feel free to post them in the comments.

Our sister organizations MacEnterprise.org and MacLearning.org will each be presenting webcasts that may be of interest to the MacResearch.org community.

On January 19 MacEnterprise.org will be presenting - Snow Leopard Server Setup: Under the Hood. The description follows:

We make use of the OpenCL framework to accelerate a gravitational physics numerical modeling application using the hardware accelerators -- Cell BE and Tesla CUDA GPU.

First, happy new year to all of the MacResearcher's out there. Hopefully everyone had a fun, safe and relaxing holiday. I wanted to give you all a quick update on the pledge drive that we were doing.

As many of you know, Warren DeLano, the author of the molecular visualization program PyMOL, passed away on Nov. 5, 2009. In honor of his work a memorial fund was established by his friends and family called The Warren L. DeLano Memorial Award for Computational Biosciences. On Nov. 15 we made a pledge that all PayPal Donations and profits from referrals in the MacResearch Amazon Store, made between Nov. 15 and Dec. 31, would be donated to the fund on behalf of the MacResearch.org community.

We've opened up the date range slightly to include all donations and sales between Nov. 5 and Dec. 31. In that time period there was a total $422.57 that came in. To all of you who made a donation or purchase, thank you very much.

In a previous post I mentioned a target of around $1000 (1% of the estimated amount needed to establish the fund). Obviously we didn't quite make it. However, since I was the one that was pushing this particular activity and it was my pet project, it's only fair I feel, that I put my money where my mouth is. So on behalf of the MacResearch.org community I'll be contributing the difference to bring the total to $1000.00 even.

Of course, you are all welcome to send your own contributions directly to the fund. And certainly if you would like to continue to support this site by making purchases in our Amazon Store or via PayPal Donations, we'd greatly appreciate that as well. All funds received from Jan 1. forward, will go directly to activities and expenses associated with maintaining this online resource.

Again, best wishes for a successful and prosperous 2010 (and beyond, of course).

I've just published a new book on Fortran programming which may interest some people here. This is the second manuscript I have published via the self-publishing site lulu.com. My experience publishing Scientific Scripting with Python a few months ago was both pleasant and profitable, which should encourage others thinking of publishing technical books via the site.

Scientific Software Development with Fortran is an introduction to the Fortran 90/95 variants of the language, which are probably the most commonly used at this point in time. Unlike most Fortran text books, this one focuses a lot on software design and engineering. It aims to not only teach the language itself, but — just as importantly — how you use it to construct robust and maintainable scientific software.

The book is available as a PDF download for €9.95, and as a printed paperback for €24.95.

By Drew McCormack

There has been quite a bit of discussion the last few days about the momentum-based scrolling that Apple uses on the iPhone. The discussion has largely been fanned by John Gruber’s Daring Fireball blog. He has been arguing for some time that one of the reasons web apps feel inferior on the iPhone to native Cocoa apps is that the WebKit-based scrolling doesn’t behave the same. A recent post pointed to a JavaScript framework that Apple is apparently using internally, and which does produce a comparable scrolling experience.

This got me wondering how difficult it would be to reproduce Apple’s momentum scrolling on your own in JavaScript. Is the reason no web developers mimic native scrolling that it is too difficult, or is it just laziness or the expectation that it is very difficult that stops them? Or is JavaScript just not up to the task? To find out, I decided to try. About 3 hours and 100 lines of JavaScript later, I have my answer. Now it’s your turn.

Things have been slow on MR.org as many of us have been extremely busy with other projects. None the less, many of you still find the content, forums and other features of the site useful. Keeping the site up and running and putting together content takes time, effort and money, and because of our schedules we need your help.

There are a number of ways you can support MacResearch:

Consider Producing Content for the Site
We need news items, stories, tutorials, product reviews. Basically if it involves science and is somehow related to Apple technology, it'll probably be of interest to our readers. We can help get the content online. Many times people mention that they don't think what they can write about is of interest to others, you'd be surprised. Contributing also means you will live longer, become rich and have whiter and brighter teeth.*

Consider Helping to Offset Our Costs
If you want to purchase something from Amazon, consider doing it through the MacResearch.org store: MR.org Amazon Store. We can add items not listed, although I think you can purchase anything from our Amazon, even it's not explicitly listed in our store.

You can also make direct donations securely and easily using PayPal

Note that any purchases OR donations made between Nov 15-December 31 will be donated to help fund The Warren L. DeLano Memorial Award for Computational Biosciences. We'd like to raise $1000 (US), and so far we have $147 (15% of the way).

No donation is too small. In fact if each unique visitor to this site, over the course of just one month, donated $1, we'd be able to fund the entire award endowment (and then some). Please consider helping out. And if you already have donated, made a purchase, or contributed directly to the fund, thank you.

Advocate for MacResearch.org Online
You can help the site out by spreading the word about MacResearch.org and any content items you find interesting by posting references (appropriately please) on other sites you frequent, via Twitter etc... Including about helping out for our pledge drive.

Get More Involved
If you have experience with maintaining and running CMS' that run on Drupal, we desperately need your help. Please get in contact with me directly at: sdg0919 [at] gmail.com

Also, if you know the answers to questions posted on the forums, feel free to chime in, don't be shy.

Again, thanks to all of you for the continued support, contributions and patronage we received so far.

*Note: These statements have not been verified by the FDA, CDC, NIH, IRS, PDF, XYZ or any other agency that is commonly referred to by its acronym.

One of the few modern cross-platform toolkits is Qt -- which allows near-native applications on Mac, Linux, Windows, and other UNIX platforms.

Yes, here at MacResearch, we prefer Mac-native applications. But if you want to run something on Linux or Windows as well as your Mac, Qt is a nice way to go. Recent versions even allow Cocoa-Qt hybrid coding, allowing you to add Mac-specific capabilities where you want.

I'll be adding a few tutorials on using Qt on Mac, but one of the best documentation sources is now completely online: C++ GUI Programming with Qt4, 2nd Edition.

The following tutorial was produced for MacResearch by VVI.

This tutorial shows how to make an iPhone application that graphs your data. It also provides the fundamentals for incorporating many 2D and 3D graph types in your iPhone applications.

Earlier this year, Apple and MacLearning.org teamed up to deliver AcademiX, a series of four one day meetings at various institutions across the US. The good news for those who were unable to attend is that the presentations were recorded, and are now available for free from iTunes via the MacLearning.org page.

MacResearchers David Gohara and Drew McCormack both presented talks on various aspects of scientific research, so you'll want to download those, but whatever you do, don't miss the presentations by Paul Hammond and Richard Miller. They present a fantastically choreographed paper, rich in multimedia. I don't think I've ever seen a more impressive presentation. (And that includes Mr. Gore's.)