MacResearch

LEUVEN, Belgium — May 6, 2008 — Orbicule today released Macnification, its brand new workflow solution for digital electron microscopy.
Macnification enables scientists to import, organize, find, annotate, analyze, adjust, compare, visualize and publish microscopic images.

We have a new poll. Does your work require non-Mac programs? For example, do you have instruments or other work which requires access to Windows, Linux, or X11 on the Mac? What kinds of programs do developers need to bring to the Mac?

If you have a Mac, if you don't know how to program in C, but have always wanted to give it a try, here is your chance: Masters of the Void is one of the best way to get you started in C, and in using C with Xcode. The web site has just been updated a couple of weeks ago, and it is thus a perfect timimg to check it out.

This nature news article explore the current software offerings for managing PDF downloads for scientists.

The Apple Science marketing group has just added a new feature to the science section of the Apple.com website. It's called the Productivity Lab and it's designed to give people a head start on using Apple software and technology in their research and work. The site currently offers five tutorials focusing on information presentation using the iWork and iLife suite of programs, as well as third party applications like the screen capture program Snapz Pro X.

The video tutorials range from 2 to 7 min and give a good overview of using the programs in a scientific setting. In particular if you know of recent switchers to Mac OS X, these tutorials may be helpful in getting them assimilated into the Apple collective.

According to my sources deep inside the halls of Apple the Productivity Lab will be regularly updated with new content each quarter. And of course if there are ideas for new content or tutorials you'd like to see let us know and we'll pass the information along.

For those of you who may be interested (or are currently using) the Wiki Server as part of Leopard Server, Apple has released new documentation on how to extend and customize it.

This guide explains how to create custom themes, allow
specific protocols, CSS styles, and HTML tags and attributes,
and manage wiki content.

The default Wiki Server configuration makes it easy for groups to collaborate and
communicate. Users can create and edit wiki pages, tag and cross-reference material,
upload files and images, add comments, and search content.

Google's Summer of Code project supports students at various levels worldwide, who want to develop open source code for a summer job. SoC supports over 1000 students and 175 free and open source projects.

A variety of the projects are very relevant to MacResearch readers. There are, of course, projects to improve Python, Ruby, Perl, and other open source programming languages. GCC received projects for improved Fortran support, and LLVM will gain improved C++ support.

Closer to Mac users, MacPorts, Adium, and WebKit all received several projects. There are also several interesting science projects, ranging from a quantum computing simulator to the CocoaBugs artificial life package. The R statistical analysis project, TeX, and National Center for Supercomputing Applications all received summer projects too.

What other "hidden gems" did I miss?

Although we briefly mentioned the news when it came out two years ago, I'd like to bring this one up again as perhaps many people are completely unaware that there's a hidden gem in every copy of iTunes on your PC or Mac. It's called iTunesU, a special section of the iTunes Music store that contains educational content from hundreds of top colleges, universities, and educationally focused organizations across the US. But the best thing is that it's freely accessible to anyone.

iTunesU contains lectures, podcasts, discussion panels and much more in almost all thinkable academic disciplines, which is great not only for students and educators but for anyone who is eager to learn. Click here to open iTunes and visit iTunesU...

Zodiac is the result of work by Nicola Zonta on developing an environment for human steered computation approaches to drug design. The application is built upon OpenBabel and the aim is to use simple input devices to allow the user to interact with a molecule and guide it into an active site.

Amazon's S3 data storage web service has been quite a hit. For a small fee, Amazon will take your data off your hands and keep it safe. The O'Reilly site has an article on how you can use Amazon S3 from Perl. There are also libraries for other languages, like Python and Ruby. Services like S3 could potentially be of interest for scientific data storage, because they are cheap and safe. Is anyone out there already using S3 for their scientific data?