Older versions of the NPNMR are not available for download anymore. Support and bug-fixing is only granted for the latest version of the software. This is simply because the effort of maintaining old code and fixing bugs for the current user base is too costly and generates no value. We therefore recommend to use only the latest version of the software.
This version was originally developed on a UNIX platform written on SGI and early Linux computers. It uses the Tk toolkit for its graphical user interface. The performance of the software was quite good. Even though a lot of code was just scripted, the loading times were short and the execution speed was incredible. The graphics and I/O parts have been written in the C programming language and as such had a good performance "by design".
Later, a Microsoft Windows port was programmed - on top of the UNIX source. The Tk toolkit had only the most essential widgets "buildt in". Others could be assembled by coding compound widgets. This was the case for comboboxes. However, the Tk toolkit left a lot to be desired. Many features that were considered standard for most APIs have to be emulated or implemented by ourselves. At the time when the last version of NPNMR 1.x was programmed, it became clear that a switch to a better, more versatile toolkit would be inevitable.
The new version was planned to be cross platform from the beginning. The C kernel of the software was polished and refactored - because strict coding standards have been followed closely from the start, most of it ( > 90 %) could be used as is for the new version. It was decided, that JAVA should used for the graphical user interface. This was because JAVA was available on all target platforms, the documentation was excellent and the user base (and programmer base) was already in the millions. At the time, the SWING library was good enough to build a medium sized desktop application with good performance. In January 2006 the 2.0 version was released.
This version offered two toolbars for quick access of often used functions. Installation was performed with Inno Setup for Microsoft Windows and a custom JAVA based installer for Linux. The code base was still homogenous, but some platform specific code was inevitable. The 2.1 Linux version could only be used with OpenGL rendering and the "Metal" look and feel. Native rendering (using the OpenGL pipeline) lead to display problems on most test systems.
Introduction of the Mac OS X version of NPNMR. Porting to Mac OS itself was trivial but only possible because Apple decided to release JAVA 6 finally on the Macintosh. Because JAVA 6 was not implemented for older Macs, NPNMR is only available for Intel Core 2 Duo based Macs. We will not provide a Universal binary version of the software.
The installer was dismissed. The current version, NPNMR 2.2, is not installed, but only copied to the users harddrive (not unlike the installation of Eclipse works).
SWS Scientific Software 1 Mar 2009 Impressum