When I did not create a new file format

What follows is the letter that, in February, explained to the users the iNMR storing strategy.
Amid so many news, now it's finally the time for me to illustrate the great innovation that version 1 brings to the field of NMR software. Up to now, it was customary for any new program to create its own new format for files, or (in exceptional cases) to adopt only one of the existing formats. This year I finally materialized an old idea of mine, namely to create a new application without creating a new format and potentially accepting any format, and whose files can be read by already existing applications. It works like this:

• Every time you open a spectrum, iNMR restarts from the original spectrometer files. In this way users are enforced to the safe practice of storing raw experimental data. Too many times I have seen unaware researchers store processed data and throwing away the FID, on the erroneous assumption that the FID is useless. Actually it's the processed data that is often useless (unless we are talking about 3D spectra).
  
• Your processing work is saved as parameters into a separate, easily recognizable file, and iNMR will reprocess everything automatically for you when you are returning to a spectrum.
  
• The iNMR files can be read and written with an Apple application that all of you already have installed, called "Property List Editor". This is why I say I have not created a new file format. I do suggest you to open a file in this way, to have an idea of how everything works. Be careful not to edit the file, because you can easily make iNMR crash.
  
• You can also open the iNMR files with TextEdit, TextWrangler or an equivalent application. From the first lines you will see that they are also XML files. I am sure you have already heard about it. XML is a great solution for storing data and it's likely that in a near future every application will be adopting it (many already do). It's certainly light years ahead of JCAMP-DX.
  
• Having adopted all the latest technologies, like Quartz for graphics and XML for files, iNMR will be compatible with future versions of the Mac OS for many years to come.
  
• You can already open iNMR spectra with other existing software. It will not recognize the XML files, but it will recognize the original spectrometer files, because they are never modified or renamed.

The overall concept seems easy, but it required a lot of programming effort. This is the reason why no other program (as far as I know) adopted a similar solution. I do hope you will appreciate the advantages of it. Consider the common example of someone having used SwaN-MR for a decade and now possessing a large library of spectra in that format (whose description has been publicly available for years). Today only Mestre-C and iNMR can read those files (I don't know why others don't). If you, instead, start now to create a library of iNMR spectra, you can (from day one) open the spectra with any software. Furthermore, iNMR doesn't need to read and convert all the acquisition parameters, because they are preserved in their original files. Other parameters (those specific to iNMR) can already be read by two ubiquitous Apple applications and, being in standard XML format, any programmer can manipulate them.