Topspin+3.1+for+Mac

Bruker announced in April the availability of Topspin finally on the Mac, joining Windows and Linux as supported platforms. This is a brief update from my earlier post bringing a few observations on this version of the software. Image copyright Bruker 2011 Visually this software looks mostly like the Windows and Linux versions, except that for users of 2.1 on Win at least, the new icons are different enough to cause a fair bit of searching, and in some cases resorting to using the menu commands, as the icons weren’t intuitive enough. [ Pop quiz: Look at the graphic above and tell me where the FT icon is...]. The major difference between this Mac version and the WinLin versions is in printing. The separate XwinPlot/PlotEditor apps that get spawned under WinLin when you invoke Print do not exist on the Mac. Instead it populates the Plot tab with a preview pane. You can print once you have it looking like you want. There is also an Export… option, which enables you to choose a DPI setting, and you choose the export format by appending the appropriate suffix (.tif, .jpg, .ps). THERE IS NO PDF OPTION. Nor can you subvert the print dialog to send it to MacOSX’s own PDF engine. To get a PDF you will need to export a Postscript file and open it in MacOSX Preview and save as PDF there. This is an obvious fail that will need to be fixed in v3.2. You don’t have to keep your data files stored in the Bruker-approved Bruker hieracrichical file system on a fileserver (e.g Z:/data/u.sername/experimentname/1/pdata/1/1r etc. The data can reside anywhere but if you’ve already got the WinLin versions of Topspin on other machines accessing the same data you may as well keep storing it that way for cross-platform convenience.