hsg@duke.cs.duke.edu (Henry Greenside) (10/01/90)
I have been using Macintosh II's in my research, and am strongly tempted to change/upgrade to the new NeXT machines because of the price/performance (among other things). It is also hard for me to believe that Apple will be able to produce competitive features with System 7.0, or to integrate UNIX and Macintosh applications in a smooth fashion (e.g., how can shell scripts pass information to a Macintosh program). The main category of software that I use on the Mac that does not yet seem available on the NeXT machines are interactive drafting software for scientific figures, e.g., the Macintosh program Igor by WaveMetrics (a similar popular program is KaleidaGraph). Igor allows rapid and detailed construction of complex x-y plots from various kinds of data files, with elegant mouse access to nearly all details of the figures. It provides a page layout capability that is quite useful in putting together multiple subplots. I use Igor heavily in making figures for papers that I submit to physics journals. This program goes way beyond what any spreadsheet, e.g., Excel, can accompish. Will such programs be available for NeXT machines? What are people presently using to make high-quality scientific figures? Henry