Category: Reviews

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…

With Time Machine and Spaces, Leopard has the whole space-time continuum covered. Or has it? Spaces was for me the feature I was most looking forward to in Leopard. I have used virtual desktops for several years, and I have come to depend on this…

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…

Vibration is a true vibration spectrum analyzer using the built in accelerometers inside the iPod Touch and iPhone. It acquires and displays time series data, optionally removes DC bias, applies a Hamming window and performs an FFT on each channel to produce frequency spectra. The…

Like many scientists, we’re interested in using graphics cards to increase the performance of some of our numerical code. With the addition of CUDA to the supported list of technologies on Mac OS X, I’ve started looking more closely at architecture and tools for implemented…

LabChart 6 is the latest version of Chart software for PowerLab data acquisition systems. PowerLab hardware with LabChart software is a turn-key solution for life science research and education. Install LabChart, connect the USB cable, click the Start Button and your data acquisition is up…

Scott Hannahs has compiled a fabulous list of the tools for Data Analysis available for Mac OS X for the SciTech mailing list and I thought it would be useful to spread the word. Remember that many of the more expensive applications have free/cheap education…

At the recent WWDC 2006 there was a discussion about the need for a simple 2D plotting tool, to meet this need David Adalsteinsson the author of the scientific visualisation tool DataTank has created DataPlot a great new 2D plotting tool with the design philosophy “Simple and Powerful Plotting”….

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….

Mac OS X is a great platform for 3D visualization. It includes OpenGL as standard, which means many existing libraries and applications can easily be ported to the platform. One such library is the Visualization Toolkit (VTK), an open source project run by Kitware, Inc. VTK is…