Chemistry on the iPhone

The iPhone has had plenty of press since it's initial announcement. In my view, one of the best features is the App store. With some 15,000 applications currently available there is something for everyone - including Chemists! From straight reference to 3D visualisation with touch interface these applications demonstrate what scientists could do on a smartphone. This is by no means an extensive list, but some apps that have caught my eye:

• Molecules (iTunes link)
  
• iMoleBuilder (iTunes link)
  
• The Chemical Touch (iTunes link)
  
• miMol (iTunes link)
  
• Atom in a box (iTunes link)
  
• Solutions (iTunes link)
  
• Wikipanion (iTunes link) - Not specifically for Chemistry, but lots of chemical data is now available on Wikipedia.

The App Store categories is the obvious way to find these, specifically in Education, Reference or Utilities. However, Solutions falls under Health & Fitness!

Anyone can write an App for the iPhone (and iPod Touch) using the SDK. It is Objective-C, not something I'm familiar with so that goes on my to do list for post-thesis!

Other smartphones are also introducing SDK's as well, e.g. Android. The mobile platform is becoming an increasingly important development arena. It is good to see that Chemistry has a presence there too.

Condor 7.2.0 success

Condor 7.2.0 is successfully running on our condor pool. Using our own compiles for Mac/PPC, openSUSE 10.3 64-bit and openSUSE 10.3 32-bit (used on 10.2/10.3/11.0/11.1 computers). Mac/Intel binaries from the condor development team.

For reference the configure options I've used are:

Mac/PPC
./configure --without-classads --without-openssl

openSUSE 10.x/11.0
./configure --disable-glibc-version-check --disable-gcc-version-check --disable-full-port --without-classads --without-gsoap

openSUSE 11.1
./configure --disable-glibc-version-check --disable-gcc-version-check --disable-full-port --without-classads --without-gsoap --without-coredumper

Otherwise compile as per my previous posts.

Make Java look native on Mac

Java is excellent as it just works on so many platforms. My Java software is used on Windows, Linux & Mac. Mac users will notice that the behaviour of Java applications doesn't follow that of the native applications (unlike on Windows/Linux). This is a bit annoying to be honest, however, there are several steps you can take to give a more Mac "feel" to your application.

This link was recently forwarded to me, some of it is certainly useful, although some outdated, but it will give you an idea of what you can alter to add that Mac feel.