Science on the Mac

This year I talked to a bunch of scientists at WWDC who can't wait to use Grand Central Dispatch and OpenCL to get the most out of their apps. For now, those discussions are under NDA but it pointed to a trend in what is bringing some scientists to the Mac. They are taking their *nix apps and bringing them over.

There are hard core Mac developers who have been writing their science applications on Macs since the OS 7 days. There is more computing power on the iPhone than on the devices these people started on. Many of the scientists I interviewed this year for Apple's Science group are targeting the iPhone for some aspect of their application. Display for some, notification for others, control of the app running on a cluster, or running a smaller version of the application.

So, why bring your *nix app to the Mac if you're a scientist?

For some, they wanted to run their existing applications on the same machine that had the consumer apps that they used. They were just combining their two worlds so that they could have iTunes, and a browser, and mail on the same machine that ran their UNIX or Linux science applications.

There were also a set of developers who moved their applications over to Mac OS X and then used the performance tools that ship for free with every Mac to improve the performance of these apps. Even for those who ended up porting the apps back to Linux or UNIX boxes, they benefitted a lot from Shark and other tools (this was pre-Instruments).

Some of the developers took existing apps and glued them together using Python, PHP, or AppleScript. Others added a GUI front end to them. Suddenly, you have attractive easy to use front ends on traditional command line applications. The next step is to integrate Apple technologies. Soon these developers added Spotlight and QuickLook plugins.

The dedicated and experienced Mac developers are creating some incredible applications like last year's ADA winner Papers or this year's ADA winner Macnification. But others are creating quite interesting applications by integrating existing applications and providing hooks into other parts of Leopard.

The 2008 Science posters aren't up yet but you can look at the 2007 Science posters. The ones with the speaker icons include my imitation of a Robert Krulwich style piece.