Category: Reviews

Each day, a researcher has to deal with a lot of data in different formats coming from different sources: measurements, graphs, papers, reviews, web pages, notes, laboratory journals, tables, schemes, pictures etc. The ways all these files are interconnected are usually complex and cannot be…

This is an interview with Stefan Eilemann, Senior Software Engineer and Consultant at Tungsten Graphics, who was running the multimonitor display at WWDC07. Stefan was responsible for porting Chromium to MacOSX, and is now working at Eyescale Software developing and deploying Equalizer, a framework for distributed, scalable graphics software. He also…

I’ve spent most of my developer life solving scientific problems and developing tools to make people more productive in one way or another. A field of software development with which I have had very little involvement is games development. To be honest, I am not even much of a…

Often when I’m trying to analyze data access patterns in code I’m optimizing, I find it useful to plot the locations of the data points on 2D (or ideally 3D) grids. A few days ago I was analyzing a complex data access routine and found…

ChemAxon are a software company that produce a variety of cheminformatics applications and software development modules. A key driver for development has been maintaining portability among various operating systems and a focus on web-based integration thus they have made extensive use of Java. Many of the…

Whilst Excel has been around on the Mac platform since 1985 and is probably the leading spreadsheet application, the data analysis capabilities and statistical analysis is still rather limited. Whilst these limitations may not be an issue for financial or accountancy uses they are a…

ChemDoodle 3.0 from iChemLabs is the latest update of a chemical drawing package that also provides for support for many other types of chemical data such as tlc plates, spectra, and molecular properties. It is a java application and is available for Mac OS X 10.5…

What is OpenMacGrid? OpenMacGrid is a computing grid built up entirely of Macs, and open to Mac-using scientists everywhere. OpenMacGrid is based on Apple’s Xgrid technology, which comes pre-installed with every copy of Mac OS X 10.4 (and later). OpenMacGrid brings the spare cycles of…

For all of us who had one day to write a report or even better a thesis, managing the references is always more or less a nightmare. Of course, expensive software like Endnote of Reference Manager can do it. However these applications are only dynamically…

Before the holidays I was asked to look at Apple’s Aperture from my perspective as a scientist to see how it could be used in a scientific setting. Now that the post holiday catch-up is over I’ve finally had time to sit down with Aperture…