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you're far more in control holding the steering wheel properly at 10 to 2.

Formula 1 drivers disagree with you. I don't know you or them personally, but I'll take their opinion over yours. :)

I believe you want access to systems running xGrid:

http://www.macresearch.org/openmacgrid

William

Yeah. Dang Apple for preventing GrandCentral use anywhere else. Imagine how cool it would be if another OS were to pick up the technology and Implement it.

Blast Apple and all their closed source stuff.

I know exactly how a GPU works. You clearly do NOT. So shut up and watch this first: http://www.macresearch.org/opencl_episode4

And maybe then you can keep your geek card. You have clearly been brainwashed by marketing crap.

It's OpenCL that opens up the GPUs to general processing on 10.6. Although GCD certainly plays a role by dispatching threads to those resources.

You should check out this astounding OpenCL demo here: http://www.macresearch.org/opencl_episode1

All of those can be accomplished in Fortran 90/95. There is even direct language support for the third requirement (private members of derived types), and I do it all the time; it works just like other public/private declarations, just placed inside the type definition. Inheritance and polymorphism (I'm guessing this is what dynamic binding means from a quick look at Wikipedia) are a bit trickier, but the techniques have been worked out and documented by these fellows (Viktor Decyk's page is also quite helpful). If you prefer to avoid typing out a certain necessary amount of boilerplate to do this, you could use Drew McCormack's forpedo preprocessor (described in detail on MacResearch). So, it's not necessary to wait for 2003, and in fact, many people haven't but have managed to write and maintain very large codes in Fortran 90/95. Good luck!

• Yahoo - mac-dev-jobs
• LinkedIn - Mac Developer Jobs

As to programming rates, it varies with experience and which part of the world you are dealing with. If you are dealing with programmers in the USA, you will have to pay higher rates for programmers working on the East or West coast because the cost of living is higher. Don't expect experienced programmers to work cheap either! An experienced programmer with 5-10 years of experience will start at $50/hour, with a typical rate of $75-$100 depending on project length and difficulty.

Remember, a good experienced programmer will do the job right the first time. An inexperienced programmer will sometimes take several tries to complete that task and the resulting program will be fragile and difficult to maintain.

A quick check for determining programming experience is to get a development estimate for your project specification. Give the programmer a complete project specification (including screen mock-ups) and have them give you a project development estimate. An inexperienced programmer will typically under-estimate the time and difficulty of the project.

If you are developing "general-purpose, scientific programs developed and released as open source", you should check the BioCocoa site to see if your project can leverage work already done there. If you can do the work in Java, the BioJava project is a good place to look for BioTech related libraries.

Another good place to find more information about doing scientific research using Mac OS X is the Mac Research web site.

Try "my own personal development experience." Are you disagreeing that he is narrowing down potential coders by selecting their platform for them?

Though you seem to be implying that biases & experience are different, experience does result in biases, and this isn't inherently good nor bad. Some of my best professors openly state on the first day of their classes what their personal biases are. Everyone has them. Experience is an educated bias. This isn't bad, except when the bias is not the result of experience (you may be thinking now "Hey, that was my entire reason you dipshit, I am experienced", but I'd point out that you're not experienced specifically in what the guy was asking for). You misread what I wrote if you felt you needed to take personal offense to my suggestion that your biases were behind the statement that I contested. To me, this is little different than a biologist getting corrected by a geologist regarding a geological topic. You aren't a Cocoa programmer. You aren't even a Mac programmer.

Are you disagreeing that he is narrowing down potential coders by selecting their platform for them?

Of course he is. Doesn't mean he won't be able to easily find the type of developer he was asking for.

Cocoa is by far the easiest application framework I've seen so far.

Great! Now, how the hell do I start that when I refuse to pay over a grand for a machine just to get the OS?

Except that the fact he is asking for Mac software probably means he already has the hardware and OS, thus making it cheaper for him to get the type of programmer he was asking for. Maybe he's not totally clueless and actually knows what he needs, and is only really needs to know how to go about getting it.

Or are you asking me to buy into Apple just so I can learn Cocoa?

My my, you've gotten personal. This was never about you, this is about what advice to give to a biomedical researcher who is asking for a Mac software developer to do a job. Don't try to make it more about you than it really should be. (Of course I'm assuming he hasn't hired you for this proposed job).

you'd also realize that for scientific research, Cocoa really can be ideal.

I think it is you who are trying to force platforms & technologies on others.

Or maybe if you did your homework you'd realize that OpenStep (later renamed Cocoa) has always been attractive to researchers.
Page 3 of Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X by Aaron Hillegass (a former NeXTSTEP programmer):

Programmers loved OpenStep. It enabled them to experiment more easily with new ideas. In fact, Tim Berners-Lee developed the first Web browser and the first Web server on NeXTSTEP. Securities analysis could code and test new financial models much more quickly. Colleges were developing the applications that made their research possible. I don't know what the intelligence community was using it for, but they bought thousands of copies of OpenStep.

Keep in mind that this was back when OpenStep was very expensive and many people could not afford this stuff, but still, the people who had it loved it. Also refer to the website http://www.macresearch.org/ which is devoted solely to Mac/Cocoa developers in the scientific community. I wasn't just pulling lauds out of my ass. There is history you could have researched which supports my original statement.

Should have known never to speak about Cocoa lest an Apple fanboy hear me.

Yeah, I'm such an Apple fanboy that I go out of my way to keep my software's backend C/C++ so it's portable to non-Apple systems. I suppose what makes me an even bigger Apple fanboy is suggesting that other people do the same to keep their stuff portable too

Closures (or "blocks") are apparently coming to Objective-C.

Objective-C is not a proper replacement for C++ until it gets proper parametrized generic types (for strongly typed collections etc),

The original post was all about very practical concerns in real world programs that cause problems.

Strong typing is a nice-to-have - or I would argue, only nice to have for some. The whole point of objective C is the weak typing, and you can type what you need with protocols. Frankly I prefer a weakly typed language over a strong one, and it's not as obviously a cause of real world problems as things like buffer overflows. Asking for a strongly typed feature in a weakly typed language makes no sense to me, and seems to overlook different ways the same ideas can be implemented in a different system.

What do you think you can't do today with collections in Objective-C?

and something to prevent name collisions (namespaces, packages, etc)

I agree with that much more but disagree it's a problem in practice.

Some form of closures would also be nice to have,

Blocks.

Coming in Snow Leopard.

Since Mac OS 10.4 and later come with Xgrid already installed, it's very easy for your spare processor cycles to be donated to science. A few clicks in your System Preferences, and you're done.

Yes
Yes... ...and yes.
and another for good measure.

I just configured my ibook following the simple instructions here.

Dead simple. The process is still running at 0.0% so i guess i haven't been assigned anything yet.

First time that /. effect is beneficial to those involved!

By contributing an agent to OpenMacGrid you recognize that third parties will be running software applications on your system. MacResearch.org, will make every attempt to ensure that third party applications are safe for execution on contributed systems (agents), but in no way will MacResearch.org or its affiliates be held liable for any damage to your system resulting from participation in OpenMacGrid. It is the responsibility of the person contributing the agent to ensure that they have permission to use the system in such a fashion.

Sorry I dorked up the link. http://www.macresearch.org/grants_gov_macviewer_in staller_for_intel_based_macs

The platform of choice in different parts of academia used to be hugely determined by what platform have the software tools that the scientists need been written for. Since you do not say what field you're talking about, I can't possible comment on the accuracy of your statement.

Here you might find a lot of very serious applications that are getting used on a daily basis. This is a quite recent initiative. But it's clear from the way Apple has incorporated distributed computing into the heart of OS X that it takes science seriously (if you have a Mac, have a look under the Sharing in System Preferences and look for Xgrid).