Monday, April 20, 2009

Cool

Sweet J 2.1 sports sound and cool animation effects.

Tuesday, April 07, 2009

one look

My software always shows me the FID when I open a new spectrum. Then I transform it. Some people find this ritual annoying and prefer to see the transformed spectrum directly, because all the FIDs look the same. Sometimes it happens, however, that a FID looks different:
It merely means that something wrong happened during the acquisition. No matter what went wrong, no matter why this particular FID looks different. It is enough to recognize that it is very unusual.
Having a look at the FID is not a waste of time. Processing this particular FID and trying in all ways to compensate for its defects can potentially be a waste of time.
My software always shows me the FID because I want it so.

Wednesday, April 01, 2009

Sweet J

It took 14 years for Sweet J to grow.
When only a few hard-die fans could remember the name, version 2.0 appeared. The new interface resembles the old one, yet the differences are noteworthy. Version 1 included 4 modal dialogs. Now only the preferences dialog has survived. The other three have been fused, instead, into the main window. The interface updates immediately, therefore there is no "OK" button. The purpose of Sweet J is limited. The implementation, instead, is rather sophisticated. I say it because the source code is freely available.
When I say "sophisticated" I mean that it's not trivial to connect all the pieces of the interface to a chemistry logic. For example, if you change one of the skeleton atoms, the equation by Haasnoot et al. is no more applicable, therefore the whole interface needs to be updated (some controls disappear, for example).
The picture below has already appeared on the Apple site, on Macupdate and on Macs in Chemistry.
My blog is the official sponsor of this effort. Or is it the opposite? (Sweet J sponsoring the NMR software blog?)... There's also a theory going around which says that Lou Reed wrote a song inspired by it, which is unbelievable: "Sweet Jane" the song predates "Sweet J" the program. Maybe it's the opposite...