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p>There is a post on sci.astro.research concerning the proposed end of IRAF support and development. This is certainly a disconcerting possibility, considering the wide range of use of IRAF – by large numbers of astronomer many of whom never use NOAO telescope facilities.
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p>Has anyone else heard any rumblings about the end of IRAF support? I think IRAF users should consider sending their comments in to NOAO urging that IRAF be supported and maintained into the forseeable future. I can’t think of anything worse, especially for Macintosh users, than an end of IRAF updates and such, especially with the upcoming Intel transition that will require a new compile of IRAF.
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p>Those of us out here in the IRAF community, myself included, while we may know how to troubleshoot certainly lack the expertise to fiddle with source code and make IRAF continue to work on new OS releases, etc. If in fact NOAO is considering long-term plans that include an end to the IRAF project, that would have enormous and delitirous consequences for astronomers the world over.
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p>I’ll have more on this in the coming weeks I’m sure. If anyone knows anything further, feel free to contact me.
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So, I exchange a couple of emails with Mike Fitzpatrick over at NOAO. He seems to think supporting the new “MacTel” machines shouldn’t be too hard.
Assuming there’s wide community interest… I don’t really see a problem with the Intel switch from the IRAF side.. It would have to be a new architecture to support native compilation
(I have my doubts about the performance/reliability of Rosetta running PPC
IRAF binaries), but it shouldn’t be a difficult port since we don’t use
Apple-specific frameworks.
Similarly, he later says that they’ll worry about it when they have an Intel/Mac machine, but that they’re current concerns are with getting it to compile using GCC 4.0 on Tiger, and if they should stick with f2c or go to g77.
My guess is that once it compiles on gcc 4, getting it to compile on Intel shouldn’t be too hard. Let’s hope there just isn’t too long a delay, as I’m sure someone will email me the day the first MacTel machine arrives asking if IRAF will run on it.
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p>Well, I like to think Apple knows what they’re doing and this shift to Intel chips was made because it was neccesary. Still, it’s going to be a painful transition – and I’m not sure what they see happening to the millions of PowerPC Macs that currently exist and will remain useful for the forseeable future.
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p>As far as IRAF goes, I’m still waiting to hear from someone at NOAO as to what they think. It seems that since Darwin has run on x86 from the beginning, IRAF should compile on an Intel-based Mac very easily. So, let us hope that is the case.
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p>I’m not sure the advantages of this switch really outweight the difficulties the change will cause, but I just have to hope that Steve Jobs and his team over at Apple saw something on the horizon that just wouldn’t allow Apple to stay competitive using PowerPC chips. We certainly all watched and waited for 3 GHz G5 chips and nothing. No G5 laptop in sight. So, we’ll just have to see.
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p>The Macintosh is the computer of choice for most of us because of the excellent OS X operating system, useful applications, and well designed hardware. Presumably, these things will remain even if the CPU is no longer a PPC. I just hope they manage the transition well.
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p>68K to PowerPC. OS 9 to OS X. Apple has handled some tricky transitions pretty well. I think they can manage this one, but I’m not exactly looking forward to the bumps.
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So, this week I made a poster for the Tex-Mex 9 conference in San Antonio, which I’m off to tomorrow. My tool of choice, Apple’s new Pages program, part of iWork which also includes Keynote.
In the past, I had tried to use Powerpoint. The problem with Powerpoint for posters is twofold. One, powerpoint is not geared for printing. It’s design for screen presentation. The concepts of inches and page and paper sizes are not particularly meaningful to it. The second, bigger, problem is that it rasterizes vector graphics such as PDFs and EPS files.
What is rasterizing you ask? It takes the vector format, which is infinitely scaleable, and turns it into a bitmapped graphic of a fixed resolution….
Here we have a PDF graphic and a TIFF graphic (exported from Preview from the PDF). They look the same, no? (To fit on this page I had to rescale the screen cap, so neither looks that great actually.
Oh wait! When we zoom in, it looks awful. The one on the left is resolutionless, it’s a vector description… the one on the right is bitmapped, it’s pixels – like it was scanned.
So I take PDFs or EPS files that look like the image on the left, plunk them into Powerpoint, and when it prints out in big poster size I get garbage like that on the right. Not just for logos, but for my graphs and such too.
It was with great joy I discovered that Keynote, Apple’s presentation program, understands PDFS, and doesn’t rasterize them. It treams them and prints them as vector graphics and they look great. The problem, however, was that Keynote still was a presentation program. It didn’t understand page sizes, it just understood screen sizes. It wasn’t ideal.
But this year, along came Pages – very similar to Keynote, but specifically for laying out … well … pages. It comes with some very nice templates for fliers, resums, newsletters. It’s tightly integrated with iPhoto so it’s easy to drop in pictures, etc.
But for the cause of poster making, posters for a scientific conference, it’s fabulous. It supports columns very easily. It supports vector PDFs. It allows a graphic to either move with text or stay affixed in a specific spot on the page … with or without word wrap. It’s great!
My only early concerns were that Pages can sometimes be slow, and this was hampering me when I tried to turn my old poster into a poster template for Pages. But I didn’t have that problem this time. I plan on making a Poster Template for pages available for download soon.
Meanwhile, check back for a PDF of my poster after the conference.
Tags: apple, keynote, pages, PDF, posters, powerpoint — .