MacResearch

The native MathWorks MATLAB R2009a beta for 64-bit Intel-based Macs is now available.

Customers who have a subscription to MathWorks Software Maintenance Service may download the professional version. The current target release for 64-bit Mac is R2009b.

Unless you've lived under a rock for the past year, you know full well that Twitter is all the rage with the cool, young hipsters these days. As you might expect, there are a number of interesting Twitterers, um Tweeps, err whatever, using Twitter. A few on my "follow" list include: @mza, @medmacs, @mekentosj, @iGotchi, and @cparnot. If you Twitter, I would encourage you to put your Twitter handle in the comments of this post, and better yet, include the names of interesting people you follow that might be of interest to the MacResearch crowd. Maybe we'll create a MacResearch Twitter directory on this site some day if we get enough traction. Oh, and if I may shamelessly plug myself, my Twitter handle is @jdudley.

Need a little help recognizing mathematical symbols or LaTeX commands?
I always tend to lookup certain LaTeX commands on the internet when I'm writing. So I decided to write a simple iPhone/iPod Touch app that lets me look up LaTeX symbols anytime when I'm feeling inspired.

It's free. And updates are on the way!

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, Corey Floyd presents Compounds, an iPhone/iPod touch application that can be used to solve chemical stoichiometries.

Too often in our work, we are forced to use tools that perform functions we require, yet
werenʼt specifically designed for our exact purposes. A calculator, with itʼs fixed
interface, is a great illustration of this fact. It is a great all-purpose device, but in many
cases, makes the user jump through hoops to accomplish a specific task.

Author: Charles Parnot

The rumor mill has been running at higher speed recently around a supposedly coming-real-soon Apple's netbook. As a geeky technology-dreamer scientist, I have been wishing for a long time that Apple would finally make a tablet-format iPhone that could run Mac OS X on a touch screen. I probably could not afford it, but I would definitely play with it at the Apple Store. Up until today, I had been very dimsissive of these rumors, mainly on the basis that Apple does not cater to the geeks anymore, and does not enter low-margin markets. But I just changed my mind 2 weeks ago! Here is why...

A while ago I suggested that perhaps the iPhone platform could offer an avenue for publishing technical books. In summary, I argued that the App Store offers a broad distribution network, takes care of sales processing, and even offers DRM protection of content. The only thing really missing was a basic book reader.

I happen to have a few book length manuscripts lying around, so I decided to take one of them — Scientific Scripting with Python — and undertake an experiment: I developed a basic book reader, reformatted the manuscript for the iPhone, and submitted it to the App Store. Yesterday it was accepted, and you can now purchase the book in iTunes for $4.99. As far as I am aware, it's the first tech book to be published exclusively through the App Store.

Author: Drew McCormack
Web Site: MentalFaculty.com

In April 2008, Google announced Google App Engine, their long-awaited answer to web services offered by Amazon and others. Google took a different approach to their competitors by including a full application stack for developers. This made App Engine less flexible, by forcing developers to use the programming tools and libraries that Google supplied, but it did have the advantage that you could get your web app up and running very quickly, and easily leverage Google’s infrastructure. An app could scale up with very little work on the part of the developer — in theory.

Although the theory was sound, in practice, developers were quite limited in the resources they had available, and there was no option to increase those resources. Google has now addressed that, allowing developers to pay for resources at rates comparable to Amazon Web Services, so it seems App Engine may finally be ready for prime time.

A couple of months ago, my interest in App Engine was piqued enough to take a closer look. I spent about a week developing a Twitter-like web site called Mental Drain. (The site is fully operational, if a bit rough around the edges. You can try it out by logging in with your Google account.) In the rest of this post, I’ll discuss what’s involved in developing a web app with App Engine, and provide a few examples from the code I wrote for Mental Drain.

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.