Ten Years Ago

[GB, author of iNMR]

I took the decision of writing iNMR in the second half of January, 2005. In the same month I also chose the name. I remember it was about 1 P.M. and I was strolling in Via Rosolino Pilo, Florence. I don't remember the date and maybe even the place is inaccurate.
The meaning was simply "NMR for the iMac". When the program appeared, many interpreted the name as "NMR for personal use, simple, easy and essential". That wasn't my intention. Now that the program is mature, and that's not Mac-only anymore, the second definition is more accurate, though my project was different. The meaning of the name wasn't important, anyway. It was simple, unique and recognizable: those were the important qualities. The names VNMR, DNMR and gNMR had already been used for other programs, so I was into the tradition and trendy at the same time (the iPod was at its peak of popularity).
The first thing I did, after finding the name, was to reach a computer and write to Carlos. We decided not to register the trademark, it was too expensive, but to register the web domain. Unfortunately, inmr.com was already in use. We could have chosen inmr.biz or inmr.eu. The first sounded too commercial for a scientific project and the second too local. We chose inmr.net, certainly wrong and misleading, but it described my project: to create a net among the hundreds of SwaN-MR users (me included).
The next few months were spent in studying. I had to choose the programming language (C, C++ or Objective-C?), the IDE (XCode or QT?), the framework (Carbon or Cocoa?). Then I had to learn the chosen tools, examine sample programs for Mac OS X, and start writing pieces of code just for warming up. In May, a few days after the release of Tiger, a wonderful gift arrived from Carlos: a new iMac G5 with an incredibly large screen (20"). We had been waited a few months because we wanted Tiger already installed on it. Up to then I had been using my old iMac G3. Both Macs were unlucky. The old one died in 2006 and the new one in 2009.
The bulk of the program was written from June to August. It was already a complete program, capable of processing all kinds of Bruker files. In September-October I wrote the manual, added the dialog for preferences and the filters for all other brands of spectrometer. Version 0 was then released. Before the end of the year I had added annotations (they required a lot of work). At the beginning of 2006 I added the functions to save and read files. Version 1 was released. From this moment to the end of July I took a rest. In August I wrote the simulation of spin systems, in September I added the deconvolution and in October the Spotlight plugin. In November I bought an Intel MacBook. I needed it to test the new version of iNMR, which had been recompiled as Universal Binary. It was still version 1.
The rest has already been described in the past newsletters, so I will not repeat it here.
Today I have released version 5.4.4.