iNMR news #91

[GB, author of iNMR]

TRANSPARENCY

iNMR tries to combine transparency, which means that the user sees
what the program is doing, with power and simplicity. The three things
often conflict with each other, so some compromise is required. It can
frequently happen that the user forgets which processing has been
applied. This also happen on the spectrometer, but for different
reasons. The problem, in that case, comes from the strange names and
strange unit measures that are adopted, which have nothing in common
with the details you find in literature. There is a continuous and
absurd translation: the first operator translates the names and the
values of the parameters from the spectrometer lingo to the proper
scientific description and writes an article. The second operator
reads the article and, to reproduce the experiment, must perform the
inverse translation.
With iNMR this specific problem is absent. Each operation and each
parameter is called with its own name. When the name is not clear
enough, you can read the help tips or consult the manual. You might be
asking: "Where do I find the list of parameters?". There are two
possible answers.

THE FAST ANSWER

You can examine the processing that has already been performed with
the command Edit > Copy > Processing. You'll see nothing, because the
description directly goes to the clipboard. Create an empty document
with TextEdit and issue the command Paste. This is an example of what
you can see:

==== Processing Parameters ====

Weights along f2
sine bell shifted by 90.0 degrees

Fourier Transform along f2 using 1024 points
quadrature detection; conjugation;

Linear Prediction (SVD) along f1
points from no. 512 to no. 2047 predicted using 495 exp. points and
assuming 16 signals

Weights along f1
squared sine bell shifted by 90.0 degrees

Fourier Transform along f1 using 1024 points
[echo-antiecho]
quadrature detection;

THE INTUITIVE ANSWER

You can reload the FID with the command File > Reload (I described it
in the last newsletter). Now, if you open the dialogs for processing,
one by one, you can examine all the parameters.

THE STUDENT PROMOTION IS MORE CONVENIENT IN 2012

After a couple of years, I have realized that disposable licenses
aren't always ideal for students. Sometimes students change their Mac,
for example when they find an advantageous second hand offer. To solve
this problem, version 5 has a new protection mechanism that simplifies
and allows the transfer of the license. This is allowed only once, and
requires a new proof of studentship, of course. The price has slightly
increased last week (the difference is 11 euro, or the 25%), but the
longevity has doubled.

ADOPTION

There are exactly 150 active license for version 5 (counting mine).
It's a small figure, but it is growing. Almost the half of those
licenses belongs to students, and this is really bad, both because
iNMR was not created form them and because they can't pay for it (for
its correct value, I mean). I have the impression that certain labs
are convincing their students to buy the program with their private
money, which, if true, is bad for the students and for myself too.
It's a pity that not a single campus license has been purchased this
year, despite the advertisement and despite the convenience. I invite
you to compare iNMR with whatever you like (including the apparently
free products, that I don't like to mention here). For example,
somebody else is asking 100 euro per year to add support to a freely
available application. With iNMR the price for each additional license
is 5 euro, which is twenty times lower! Well, the details are
important, so a direct comparison is not simple.

http://www.inmr.net/annual.html

Points to consider:
- our support is cheap because users rarely ask for help; don't be
afraid to ask for help, if you need it!
- iNMR can become a lot cheaper if all the Mac users into a given
campus buy a single collective license (and renew it every year).

iNMR inherited a few revolutionary ideas from SwaN-MR and added many
wonderful ones. Though not protected by patents, these ideas have
never been copied, so iNMR remains inimitable. It takes time, if you
are switching from another program, to become acquainted with iNMR,
just because it is so different. If you think, however, that another
program has a plus, compared to iNMR, write to us and we'll try to
fill the gap as quickly as possible. If you like iNMR then you'll want
it to live for a long time, because no other program will imitate it.
Certainly iNMR can't survive on the shoulders of the students. We need
to sell a few campus licenses.

VERSION 5.1.0
Has been released this morning. It makes the creation of a new CPM a
little more intuitive. The button "check all", inside the Overlay
Manager, now works.