iNMR news #89

[GB, author of iNMR]

In 2005, when iNMR wasn't born yet, Apple released a shining new
operating system, called Tiger, featuring a new smart technology,
called Spotlight. Just like Google could retrieve anything on the web,
Spotlight could retrieve anything on your Mac. In 2006 iNMR was
already born and I asked myself if this new technology could be
exploited to fill the holes in the memory of a spectroscopist.
A typical case is when you see an impurity and you can't say what it
is, yet you have the strong feeling that you have already seen the
same peak sometime in the past. Starting with version 1.6, iNMR
contained a Spotlight plugin. There was an obstacle that prevented its
generalized adoption, though: not every user had Tiger installed. Many
were still using Panther. The search module could not be added
directly into iNMR for this reason; it appeared as a stand-alone
application called "Speclight".
With iNMR 2.0, a few months later, things became simpler. The search
module became part of iNMR itself, because version 2 itself required
Tiger. Searching was accomplished more or less in this way: the user
put a mark on a peak, then the command "Edit > Search" would show a
list of all the documents containing a peak at the same frequency or
nearby. It sounds simple, but not simple enough. A more intuitive
design would have inserted the item "Search with Spotlight" into the
contextual menu that appears after a right-click.
I can't say if it was the bad design or any other reason that
prevented the success of my idea. I still think it was a simple and
wonderful idea, but apparently the whole world missed it. My approach
has been to wait, as always. Users normally discover a new feature
years after its introduction. They read this newsletter, but have no
time or patience to try a new version. It turns out that I am the one
who must be very patient indeed. Maybe things change after a decade…
Instead of improving, things became to deteriorate. Some day a bug
appeared into Mac OS. When I discovered the bug, Mac OS had already
reached version 10.6.2, but probably it was already present in
Leopard, who knows? The new versions of Spotlight weren't able to
manage lists of numbers anymore. As a result, the Finder crashed.
It was enough to select a 2-D file and choose the command "Get Info".
This is because Spotlight was indexing the spectrometer frequencies.
In the 1-D case, there is a single frequency, but in the 2-D case
there is a list of two frequencies (for example: 1-H and 13-C
frequencies). As soon as the iNMR plugin fed the list into Spotlight,
the latter began suffering and the Finder crashed. I reported the
issue on the Apple's Spotlight newsletter, and you already know how
little they care…
At the same time I modified the iNMR plugin. Now it only stored the
receiver frequency and not the transmitter frequencies. The problem
was fixed by renouncing to part of the functionality.

I was sure Apple was going to properly fix things at some time, this
year I have lost all my hopes. I already wrote about the Time Machine
crash two weeks ago, there's no need to repeat my account here again.
Today I have released two new versions of iNMR, called 4.3 and 5.0.1.
Neither of them reads or writes the peak frequencies anymore. The
problem has been completely eradicated, in theory at least. Practice
will hopefully confirm this.
From my point of view, it's a pity, because it was so funny to
retrieve a spectrum by only knowing the frequency of a peak.

In conclusion: if you are using Lion and have ever experienced a Time
Machine crash, upgrade either to version 4.3 or to 5.0.1. Be sure not
to keep any other version of iNMR installed on the same computer. In
the worst case things will remain as they are now. In the best case,
this is the end of the story.

Apart from this, I will likely release a new edition of version 5
every week, because it's so young and there's a lot of room for
refinements. Stay up-to-date, if you can.