Free scientific visualization software for mac

Scientific Notation 1.0 is designed to be a free program which offers practice for students in grades five through nine. Students may choose to change numbers from standard form to scientific notation, or the reverse. An on-screen pencil allows students and teachers to show the process. Twenty examples give teachers pre-determined examples to teach from.

Wave Simulation 1.0 is developed as a smart program which is simulative to a wave disturbance propagating on a two dimensional membrane. The program uses a timer to step the simulation. At each step a two dimensional wave equation is solved by using a finite differencing scheme that is space centered and time forward. The initial conditions have been exaggerated for better visibility in the OpenGL output. See the commentary in the source code for further details. The idea here is to demonstrate simple numerical processing and scientific visualization in a Cocoa based application.

The program structure uses the Model/View/Controller paradigm. The classes for this structure are grouped under one heading and the various support classes are grouped under another heading. The View part of the program combines the user interface (UI) and the OpenGL rendering. The GLView class is a wrapper, i.e., sub-class, around the NSOpenGLView class that gives the class the ability to render, among other things, a mesh that is passed in from an outside source.

The view point and lighting that the GLView class uses in its rendering is also provided from outside. The visible part of the GLView in the UI is an outlet for the rendering. Also, the GLView object has been set up so that a mouse click in the visible rendering area toggle betwever, each update cycle is quick enough to justify a single threaded structure for the program.

An important characteristic of this program is that the OpenGL rendering is encapsulated in two parts of the program: the GLView class and the DrawingFunctions.h module. All of the other support classes make no reference to OpenGL. The Avian class is meant to capture the concept of an extended physical body that can have a location in 3D space as well as an orientation.

The FlyingCamera class is based on the Avian class and provides it with extras that are appropriate for handling views from various positions and orientations. The Mesh and MeshNode clases are also divorced from OpenGL. A GLView object 'knows' what to do with FlyingCamera and Mesh objects, but not vice versa. Also, the Controller object 'knows' how to relate user input, via the steppers, to FlyingCamera settings.

This program is also provides a good way to waste enormous quantities of time. The membrane uses a material that is meant to be a fair approximation of ruby. When the light is set to, say, colatitude equal to 35 degrees and longitude equal to 200 degrees the surface shows some nice highlights. Be warned: this program can induce a hypnotic state in the unwary user.