Best Scientific Graphing App for Mac?

Hi, I am a scientist.

Crowd: "hello scientist"

I need a software to do professional looking graphs, plots, charts, 2D and 3D in Mac. Which one?

Tauron said:

Hi, I am a scientist.

Crowd: "hello scientist"

I need a software to do professional looking graphs, plots, charts, 2D and 3D in Mac. Which one?

Click to expand...

I use Maple 11 for most of that stuff on my iBook and it tends to work extremely well. Not sure how it would fit your exact needs (You would need to check it out.)

I assume since you're a "scientist," you mean to plot real data. There are many numerical and plotting packages used by professionals, with MATLAB being the most popular one most likely, especially among physicists, applied mathematicians and the like. If you're up for something more daring (or don't want to shell out hundreds of dollars), I would go with an open-source solution like the Python scripting language, specifically using the matplotlib module for 2D plotting and the mayavi module for 3D plotting. I know some version of matplotlib supported 3D plots as well, but this has been abandoned in SVN and I don't know how far along the official releases are. Alternatively, if you want something more MATLAB-like, GNU Octave is an open-source package that has the sole purpose of being a carbon copy of MATLAB's command line interface. It even recognizes M-files generally. If you're in this business, you've probably already used the packages you know you want to use, and they probably have Mac versions. Just Google around for the stuff you know and love.

I used to use SigmaPlot for PC, but they don't have a mac version and it wasn't too good in the PC either.

I will look around some more. Another is IGOR Pro, but if it is just a port from Winblows then it is going to be poor because most windows apps UI pale in comparison. I tend to stay away from character-based apps like using Python or Matlab for plotting because it simply makes no sense to me to spend more time typing to do the same thing the same subroutine would do if paired with a good GUI.

I guess I will just try a bunch to see what I like.

Tauron said:

I used to use SigmaPlot for PC, but they don't have a mac version and it wasn't too good in the PC either.

I will look around some more. Another is IGOR Pro, but if it is just a port from Winblows then it is going to be poor because most windows apps UI pale in comparison. I tend to stay away from character-based apps like using Python or Matlab for plotting because it simply makes no sense to me to spend more time typing to do the same thing the same subroutine would do if paired with a good GUI.

I guess I will just try a bunch to see what I like.

Click to expand...

I can see the desire for simplicity, but you get a lot more control with a programming/scripting language, and the plotting parts tend to have really simple commands. That said, Mac OS X 10.5 comes with a program called "Grapher" that provides a neat GUI interface for plotting either functions or point sets in a variety of different formats. It can be found at /Applications/Utilities/Grapher.app

Historically, dedicated packages like DeltaGraph and KaleidaGraph have been used for results presentation. (At one time, it was fairly standard practice to do computation on a "real"computer like a VAX or Unix machine, and use a Mac running one of these packages to generate graphs.)