Mac Stuff

Virtual desktops update

I've just started trying out FileMaker 8 and discovered an unfortunate incompatibility with CodeTek VirtualDesktop Pro. I'd previously blogged on my move to Desktop Manger when Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger) arrived, but when CodeTek fixed their incompatibility I moved back as I really liked the facility to be able have some applications appear on all desktops, and others only on one. I also find the pop-up panel for displaying virtual desktops and dragging windows to be very useful in CodeTek's implementation.

Well, unfortunately I've discovered a very big screen refresh issue with using FileMaker 8 and VirtualDesktop. Given the general compatibility of VirtualDesktop with other applications I'm inclined to deduce that the problem is more likely to be FileMaker's than CodeTek's. However, it's going to leave me virtual desktop (with a small 'c') free for a while until something is fixed, or I find a working alternative that works for me.

Graphing software - Plot

I've just made another one of those exciting discoveries of a piece of really useful well developed software that I've never noticed before. It's called Plot and it's a Mac OS X graphing package with a scientific flavour and lots of flexibility.

Okay, I've only just noticed it and tried it for about 2 minutes. But I'm already fairly impressed. The example graphs look good, it outputs to a good quality vector PDF or EPS for effective use in packages like OmniGraffle or Keynote, and it supports error-bars amongst many other things.

If that wasn't enough, it is free, it has some substantial documentation, and it has a whole plethora of features including MySQL data importing and perl scripting.

So far I've spotted two negative points, but given all the other features of the package, I wouldn't be surprised if these are fixed quite quickly. Firstly, if you resize a graph window, the labels don't move with the rest of the graph. (Note, however, that this isn't a problem when you export to PDF and then resize.) The other problem is that the exported graphs have non-transparent backgrounds, so you can't use them as easily and effectively in packages like Keynote when you want to have graphs on a standard presentation template background.