MacResearch

Author: Alexander Griekspoor
Web Site: www.mekentosj.com

SOAP based web services and Cocoa have never been good friends, and although REST based webservices are fortunately today's standard there are still tons of SOAP-based ones out there. What has always been missing in Cocoa is high level support for interacting with SOAP-based webservices. Here I describe one way in which you can build such frameworks yourself, starting by analysing the webservice calls in detail in this part 1 and generating the necessary Cocoa classes for use in a Mac or iPhone application next time.

Author: Drew McCormack
Web Site: macanics.net, maccoremac.com

Around 3 years ago, I co-authored the book Beginning Mac OS X Programming with Mike Trent. It takes a broad look at developing software on the Mac, covering as much ground as possible, from Carbon to Cocoa, and even AppleScript. As far as I know, it is the only book for the Mac that has taken this approach. As with any computer book, shelf life is relatively short, and you can now find it for free on Google Books.

When I first decided I wanted to write a book, I was very green, and didn’t know what was involved, how much I would be paid, and so forth. In case there are others out there thinking about writing a technical book, I thought I would put together a short FAQ on what you can expect if you do write a book.

Astronomers are often confronted with plotting and binning on a spherical surface, such as the projected sky. For instance, one might want to measure the density of stars at many points on the sky by dividing the sky up into equal area bins and counting the stars in those bins.

Charles Parnot’s article on iPhone business models, and how they relate to scientists, has got me thinking about what types of apps would really be useful on the platform. To date, most scientific apps have been pretty much ported straight over from the Mac — we haven’t yet seen any significant rethink of what type of scientific software would actually be suited to the new platform. I know there are developers working on it, and I think we will see new and interesting applications appear in the coming months, but I don’t think we have seen any yet.

Author: Charles Parnot

[Note: many of the links in this story will open the page for an app in the iTunes Store. I realize it can be annoying. I have thus made sure that hovering on the link will clearly indicate in the title if it is a link to iTunes.]

The iTunes App Store opened its doors a little more than 5 months ago and has been a huge success, at least based on the numbers of applications available (more than 10,000) and the number of downloads (more than 300 millions). With a size getting close to 20 or 30 million owners worldwide (remember, iPod Touch!), the market for iPhone apps sure looks like a gold mine. However, several developers have recently voiced their concerns about the way the App Store is shaping up: the gold mine may in fact look more like a golden goose slowly choking in an overcrowded market. Is that really true?...

If you write articles containing chemistry specific words then this will be a godsend

http://www.chemistry-blog.com/2008/12/17/chemistry-dictionary-for-word-processors-version-20/

If you are like me, your iPhone home screen is full to the brim with apps, but you probably only use a handful regularly. There are lots of 'cool' apps for the iPhone, but I find myself opening these apps once, admiring the craftmanship, and then forgetting all about them.

So I thought it would be interesting to get a discussion going of the most useful 3rd party iPhone apps — the ones you actually open regularly. Even though this is not strictly a subject for this web site, the fact that it is taking place here will slant the list to apps that researchers find useful.

The OpenCL 1.0 specification has been ratified by the Khronos promoters. The specification was approved on Dec. 4th. The official spec and headers can be obtained at:

http://www.khronos.org/registry/cl/

UPDATED
The official press release is here.

Google has released a configuration utility called Calaboration.app that will allow you to fully integrate your Google calendars into iCal.

Amazon announced that they will be offering free hosting for several popular scientific data sets. I think this is a genius move for Amazon as it eliminates the cost of uploading your big data sets to the Amazon system. With the data sets already staged on their S3 system, all you need to do is fire up any number of compute nodes in EC2 and perform the necessary computations on the data. Amazon will allow you to create your own, private snapshot of the public data that you can compute on and store in a personal Amazon EBS volume. The following scientific data sets will be available initially:

Biology

• Annotated Human Genome Data provided by ENSEMBL

Chemistry

• A 3D Version of the PubChem Library provided by Rajarshi Guha at Indiana University
• UGI Virtual Conformer Library provided by Rajarshi Guha at Indiana University. 80GB of data in SD format on conformers for 500,000 molecules that can be used for virtual screening

It seems that they are open to suggestions for additional data sets so please send them your suggestions.