hines@portia.Stanford.EDU (Melissa Hines) (04/13/90)
I just got home from MacWorld Expo and settled down with my complimentary copy of MacWorld. Although I don't subscribe to either MacWorld or MacUser (not "technical" enough for my taste), I do look at the odd issue for product reviews. Anyway, I immediately turned to the review of my favorite Mac program, Igor, and I was appalled at the quality of the review! It is wrong, poorly structured, and not very informative. Dave Kosiur, the author of the review, must have spent a full 20 minutes with the product. Too bad he didn't open the manual! Example: "Although it is not a big thing, I wish that Igor's zooming of plots were [sic] a bit more interactive. To rescale a plot [description deleted]. I'd much rather see a tool that lets you select a part of the graph that you want to zoom, as KaleidaGraph does." Arghh!! Igor lets you rescale your plots in a VERY INTUITIVE fashion JUST LIKE HE WANTS!! You just click and drag around the data you want expanded, click in the selected region (menu appears) and select Expand (or expand vertically, expand horizontally, etc.) THIS IS EXPLAINED very clearly in the "Guided Tour of Igor" (p. 18). It is also explained in the section on "Scaling Graphs" (pp. 101-2). It even has PICTURES (4) showing exactly what is going on. It is indexed under these entries: scaling graphs expanding graphs graphs, expand graphs, scaling . . . and maybe more Can't the guys at MacWorld RTFM??? Example: "There are a few plotting and analytical options missing from Igor." This is inflammatory! Mr. Kosiur never tells us what exactly is missing from Igor, he just asserts it's not there. I would, perhaps, concur that some plotting options are missing (no 3-D pie charts like Wingz. Horrors!), but analytical options???? It does FFT, IFFT, non-linear least squares fit to any function, many linear fits, etc. What is missing? I've used the program for 15 months VERY HEAVILY and I have yet to run across some sort of analysis I can't do! Example: "Cons: Limited text-data import facilities" (in header) Again, nothing more is said about this. What does limited mean? This is worthless information for someone shopping for a graphing/data analysis package. There is more, but you get the idea. This review is worthless/misleading/wrong. I can only assume that the other reviews are equally in depth. What is the point of having a gazillion worthless reviews per issue? Why not have just a few well done, in depth reviews? And I have 6 more months of this coming for free courtesy of the MacWorld Expo. Oh boy! I can hardly wait. (BTW, if you want to know more about Igor, I posted two summaries to the net a while back. I'll be glad to mail them to you!) Melissa A. Hines Dept. of Chemistry Stanford Univ. Hines@Portia.Stanford.Edu / Hines@Cellbio.Stanford.Edu