MacResearch, Science and WWDC 2006
WWDC 2006 is next week and there is going to be a lot going on regarding science and all things Mac. Below are some of the more notable items that might be of interest to scientists attending. If you aren't able to attend, don't worry MacResearch will be there serving as your eyes and ears. For those of you who can't attend, if you have questions you would like us to investigate directly with developers, common concerns or requests (for Apple or third-party developers) reply to this thread and we'll try to get some answers or provide feed back on your behalf.
For those of you attending keep an eye out for us. We'll be the really good looking guys that look like they belong at a GQ convention and not WWDC. Or find us at some of the following events and locations:
Science Connection Community Area
Tues-Thurs 9:30am -6:30pm, Fri 9:30am-1:30pm : 3rd Floor Moscone West 1st Alcove
Apple will host a special community area for science professionals at WWDC. This is a great place to meet colleagues old and new, post messages, network with science experts from all over Apple, and test drive scientific software on the latest Apple hardware. It's also the location for key scientific computing events. Be sure to drop by between sessions, at lunch, and during other breaks to catch up with the science community at WWDC.
Mac OS X and Scientific Computing
Session 003 : Tue 10:30am Marina (schedule on web will be updated soon)
http://developer.apple.com/wwdc/sessions/index.html#003
Lunchtime Community Discussions
Tue 12:30pm Van Ness: Science : Mac OS X technologies for scientific research
Wed 12:30pm Science Connection: Scientific Instrumentation on Mac OS X
Thu 12:30pm Van Ness: Community Resources for Mac OS X Researchers (this one is moderated by yours truly)
Apple Design Awards - Best Scientific Computing Application
Tue 7:00pm Presidio
Scientific Development Poster Session
Wed 7:00-10pm Moscone West
Scientific Solution Demos
Wed 9-12pm & 2-6:30 Science Connection
Thu 9-12pm & 2-6:30 Science Connection
Sessions occuring throughout the week that may be of interest to scientists:
Black Belt Java Debugging
Core Data in a Nutshell
Core Data Model Versioning and Data Migration
Creating Great Automator Actions: Advanced Topics
Creating Great Automator Actions: The Basics
Debugging with Xcode
Designing for Security
Develop on Mac OS X and Deploy on Xserve
Developing and Porting UNIX Applications on Mac OS X
Graphics and Media State of the Union
Introduction to Cocoa Bindings
Java on Mac OS X Overview
Maximizing the Performance of Resource-Hungry Applications
Multithreading in Cocoa
Optimal 2D Graphics
Performance and Graphics Tuning Your Java Application
Performance Optimization for Intel-Based Macs
Scientific Clusters on Mac OS X Server and Xserve
User Interface Design
Using Intel Software Development Products for Mac OS X
Using the OpenGL Shading Language
Xcode: Accelerating Development of Complex Projects
Adding AppleScript Scriptability to your Application
Beyond Buttons and Sliders: Complex Controls in Cocoa
Daemon Wrangling with launchd
High-Performance QuickTime Video Processing
I/O Technologies Overview: Best Practices for Driver Development
Mixed Platform Messaging Solutions
See you there!
Comments
Ada and Xcode
GNAT is an Ada 95 (and now 2005) world-class Ada compiler and an official member of gcc. With its own web site, http://www.macada.org/, and an extraordinarily capable and committed porting team, Ada has been integrated with Xcode and has complete Carbon bindings. Yet, Xcode treats Ada as a second-class citizen. Part of this is due to the C-bias in the debugger, GDB, but other parts are not.
Ada is not the only language that gets short shrift from Xcode. Does Apple have plans to make Xcode more accommodating to "foreign" (read, non-C) languages, in particular, Ada, which is part of gcc? Does Apple have plans to include Ada in the Developer Tools?
Re: Ada and Xcode
This has been one of our biggest requests for some time (not Ada necessarily, but a published plugin interface so that anyone can extend Xcode). I'm hoping that this is going to be announced at WWDC but if it's not, we'll voice this request for certain, because it's something that many people have found to be a bit of a roadblock in adopting Xcode completely.
Thanks for the input,
Dave
3D Graphics
One comment I've heard from a couple of people is regard to the current status of OpenGL under MacOSX, a number of Quad buffered Stereo OpenGL applications don't run under MacOSX.
Some other requests
Apple-supported Fortran compiler with the Developer tools installation
Symlinks for libblas and liblapack -> Accelerate.framework. This would make it *much* easier to compile UNIX chem. programs like GAMESS or MOPAC or Gaussian.
Accelerated double-precision BLAS / LAPACK.
Better integration between XGrid and other clustering tools like PBS or Sun Grid Engine
Re: 3D Graphics
The issue I think most people are talking about is Stereo support using X11 apps. And it is correct that this doesn't work (although it works fine for standard OpenGL apps). Apple is working on this, and without going into any details, I can say that at some point in the future a fix will be made available.
Spotlight
The excellent ChemSpotlight can added meta data (MWt, SMILES etc.) tags to a wide variety of chemical file formats. What would be even better would be able to add meta data to document files that contain embeded chemical structures.
Instrumentation and OpenGL performance are the two issues for me
I see that there is one lunch time session dedicated to this topic:
Wed 12:30pm Science Connection: Scientific Instrumentation on Mac OS X
I do hope you can attend and find out what's going on here. Back in the 90's, when all the researchers I knew were using PCs, all our instruments came with Mac's running System 7 or System 8, and we all hated Macs. Now that most of the researchers I know have switched to Macs running OS X, all the instruments come with PCs running XP and we hate them. Every vendor I talk to about this says "we don't have any control over this... we contract out our software development, and they say they don't have any Mac-compatible tools or expertise." I always tell them to hire different programmers, but this is not likely to happen.
On an unrelated note, I'd love to hear about anything Apple might be doing to make OpenGL under OS X suck less.
Cheers