One of the most important resources for developing modern analytical systems is the ability to generate custom software. Being able to model the behavior of a system in software can save enormous amounts of wasted design time by identifying the critical components of the system. Once a breadboard of the system is produced, flexible software is then necessary to exercise it and refine its measurement algorithms. Production and diagnostic software allows a more rapid assembly and testing of the final product. Finally, statistical software allows us to analyze the performance of the new test system in comparison to established methods; these studies may require as little as a few hundred samples from one or two sites or as many as thousands of analyses from many national and international locations. It is fair to say that most of our inventions could not have been produced were it not for our software tools.
At the beginning, our software was largely hand-coded 6502 assembly language running on a 48K Apple II. Now, the availability of inexpensive and extremely powerful computers running modern operating systems and using object-based languages allows us almost unlimited flexibility. As the hardware and programming environments have matured over the years, we have evolved from single applications compiled with solely procedural languages such as Pascal, Modula-2 and C, to cooperating, network-aware, independently executing applications written in C++. We intend to evolve along with the available technology.
A number of our applications were written for the Be® operating and development system (BeOS®). Unfortunately, it is now defunct, although some of our legacy software is still available here. After a great deal of thrashing around following the death of Be, I have begun using the TrollTech's QT environment. This gives the user an API for GUI applications which can be compiled for Windows, Mac or Linux environments with little or no modification between platforms (unless driver-level services are required). The people at TrollTech provide both a commercial and GPL version, which is a unique, and I believe excellent, business model. Writing code in this environment is almost pleasant.
As of December, 2005,. I have set up a web page for QT4 software projects, which are avaliable as FreeWare.