MacResearch

Many scientists work at government installations and until Macs are seen by gov't IT on par with Windows PCs, then Mac users will continue to spend too much of their time justifying their use. Apple has begun work on integrating OSX with various gov't-used tools but they need to increase their effort to catch up. Properly working common access cards, SCAP content, demonstrating alternatives to Exchange, as well as actively working on many other initiatives would secure Apple's spot in gov't facilities.

add to poll: Increase effort to support Macs in government installations

cyber analyst

We sell an x-ray spectrometer. For the last 18 months or so there has been a strong uptick in the number of customers asking for OS X versions of our software or at least for ways to get the data from the PC to OS X.

Currently most scientific instruments are driven by windows PCs. Much of the output is directed to Word or PPT. This is OK for simply reporting data but it doesn't let you reuse it easily in other programs. I think the decisions to go in this direction were simply "design laziness" on the part of these manufacturers. The executives use Word, PPT and Excel and are unfamiliar with other formats. If they say they are Office compatible it is a nice checkbox they can tick off in the product specs.

Apple could work with scientific societies to encourage development of open formats for storing data that are platform agnostic.

For example, around 1990 the Microscopy Society of America developed a file format for storing spectra. It is ASCII, human readable and more or less cross platform. The biggest issue with this being the different conventions for the use of CR and LF on Macs and PCs.

Currently NIH Image (Mac only) is being replaced with Image J (java version). Apple could offer some small support to this effort to ensure that the OS X compatibility is really solid. (I don't know that they are not doing this but I submit it as an example of the kind of ongoing work that Apple could assist.)

There are two reasons people use latex.

One is just plain better output, especially of mathematical /scientific output. Pages does get a little bit closer than Word(well at least 2004 - haven't tried the new one yet), but it is still much poorer. Just the fact that latex forces you to use fonts that were designed for such output, means that it is always going to be better at producing typeset output. Of course latex is designed by scientists, so that things like spacing are just handled much more naturally in latex.

The second is the difficulty of inputing the remarkably large number of characters that are required in scientific output. They may all be there somewhere in unicode fonts, but it is still a pig to be able to find them. Unless you come up with some huge new scientific keyboard that accesses these special characters (and then you had better make specialised ones for just about every subfield of science), there is not an easy way to be able input these characters in a normal word processor. I find the character palette method of putting in special characters particularly laborious). With latex if you know the name of the character then it is relatively simple, for example \alpha (much quicker than reaching for my mouse), or \gg. Without some kind of character recognition on a writing pad or graphics tablet, I don't see any easier way of doing this.

One tip though, when I am forced to use word (as we all are from time to time), I have set up autoformat so that it actually replaces a \alpha with a (wait while I reach for the mouse) α and a × for \times for a etc.

I mean honestly, how difficult is it to reach for the typeset button?

Along the same line as John Konopka: encourage companies that make hardware to be OS X compatible. I am thinking specifically about data acquisition companies (National Instruments, and others). One problem for people who prefer to do acquisition on the Mac is that hardware solutions (with associated software) are minimal: often we only have one or two vendors. In addition (this has been discussed here before), very often the software is sub-par (e.g., National instruments's incomplete and buggy libraries). There are great companies (Active Silicon supports 4-5 operating systems for all their video acquisition cards with exquisite software libraries), but these are the exception rather than the rule.

Maybe some resources could be put into helping these companies port their software properly to the Mac? Very often, their libraries are not even really PC specific, it's just that they don't think there is a market for an OS X version and don't have the expertise to do it.