ChemBuddy 1.1a3 review
DownloadChemBuddy is a chemical analysis program for students, chemists, and hobbyists alike.
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ChemBuddy is a chemical analysis program for students, chemists, and hobbyists alike. It performs many functions from various aspects of chemistry.
Cocoa/Objective-C chemical analysis and computation program; includes gas laws, solutions/solubility, stoichiometry, periodic tables, etc
What's New:
I created a new, 'native' project file for ChemBuddy, under the Xcode developer tools on Mac OS 10.3 ('Panther'). This, ironically enough, seems to have allowed me to make it compatible with Jaguar, as I am now easily able to manipulate the target OS version.
The programme should function under Jaguar now.
The main interface has been cleaned up quite a bit, and now takes the form of an outline view, rather than tab views with buttons. Its behaviour could still use some further refinement. This has, however, required me to change the Controllers.plist file from earlier versions: it is now somewhat more complicated, and has been renamed ControllerHierarchy.plist; and I have added yet another file, Controllers.plist, which is simply a list of the controllers. This, needless to say, is quite redundant, but I'm still trying to work out the best solution (perhaps someone else may examine the source and shout, 'Why Reka! I have found it!').
The version issue has been fixed. Several individuals noted that the previous distribution was supposed to be 1.1a2, rather than 1.1a1, but (due, again, to compiling in an older project format) this version-change appeared only on 10.3, rather than 10.2, which still showed my earlier, private alpha version. Future versions should hopefully experience no such inconsistencies.
The periodic tables have been implemented more fully. Atomic numbers, smaller than the symbols and dark grey in colour, now appear atop the symbols.
The nib files from the previous alpha maintained atomic symbol and number in the nib file itself as title and alternate title, respectively, for purposes of consulting PTCells.plist, a property list dictionary, for data. I migrated the property list to an array, accessed via the tags of cells (transparent ones all have a tag of -1 now).
I also use attributed strings for the numbers and symbols on the periodic table buttons at this point. Older methods called from drawInteriorWithFrame: have been removed, as have several commented-out ones.
The legends, as a final note, still leave something to be desired, as they are clunky and somewhat difficult to maintain at this point.
I removed the outdated online help from the project, thus trimming four-fifths of a megabyte from the programme size.
I deleted an extraneous nib backup from the English.lproj folder.
The Italian.lproj folder is not included with this release, as it contained only a localised credits file; it and other localisations will be reimplemented at some point, hopefully by user and developer contributions.
ChemBuddy 1.1a3 keywords