By Tom Nelson Itching to get your hands on the? There are some very important steps to take before you expose your Mac to any beta software, and when the beta is of a new operating system release, you really should consider building a wall between the beta software and the Mac OS and apps you use daily for work and play. Before we begin constructing the beta wall, let’s take a moment to look at the macOS Beta programs available to you. Apple Developer Program This is probably the best-known method of gaining access to the resources needed to develop for the Mac.
If you have a hankering to build an app, develop an extension, or integrate tools with the Mac operating system, is the place to start. There are various developer memberships levels, from free, which gives you access to documentation, the Xcode developers’ suite, and the Swift programming language, to paid yearly memberships, which include the ability to distribute your applications through the appropriate App Store, as well as access the various operating system and app betas that Apple provides to its developers. The macOS Mojave beta was made available to developers shortly after the WWDC 2018 keynote speech. Apple Beta Software Program Apple also provides betas of its operating systems to the general public through the free. This program is open to all Apple users willing to sign up for the program and participate by providing feedback on the betas they’re working with. The public beta releases are expected mid-summer.
Sign up now if you wish to participate in any of Apple’s beta programs. Betas provided through the public Beta Software Program lag slightly behind those given to Apple developers. I’ve always thought of the difference between the two this way: Apple gives the latest beta version to the developers to help find major issues, like a bug that deletes all the files on your startup drive.
After a week or so of being in the developers’ hands with no catastrophic bugs showing up, the beta (usually under a slightly different version number) is released through the public beta program. Having more eyes on the beta operating system through the public release should cause additional bugs and issues to be discovered and reported to Apple. The macOS Mojave public beta is expected to be released mid-summer.
Building the Beta Wall As noted above, the purpose of betas is to help discover bugs and issues in a beta app. This means that anyone participating in either beta program should expect to encounter problems that could range from a funny misspelling in a menu, to a minor annoyance in how an app works, to system freezes or data loss. Which brings us to the first rule of working with Apple betas: Never install a beta on your primary computer. This rule, however, tends to be impractical for most users of a public beta. Many of us don’t have multiple computers, and if we do, we probably don’t have one that we can dedicate for use only with beta software. A more practical approach is to isolate the beta, and keep it from interacting with the startup drive and the data you use daily. The usual methods to isolate a beta are to that you can selectively boot from when you wish to work with the beta, or install it on a, that runs the beta as a guest OS, with any interaction with your main Mac being performed through the virtual machine software.
Each method has its advantages. Installing on an external bootable drive allows you to work with the beta in its normal environment; no virtual software performing translations, or pretending to be hardware devices. You experience the beta operating directly on your Mac’s hardware. The major disadvantage is the inconvenience of having to reboot your Mac whenever you wish to use the beta software. When you choose to install the beta in a virtual environment, you can work with both the beta and your normal Mac OS at the same time. The disadvantage is the virtual environment is generally slower, especially graphics performance, which can be subpar during the beta phase and even prevent some new OS features from working as intended.
In this article, I’m going to assume you’re installing the beta on an external drive that you will selectively boot from when you want to use the macOS beta. Because the beta install process may also, I don’t recommend installing the beta on any current internal drives your Mac may have.
I’m not saying to; I just don’t think it’s a good idea to let a beta installer convert a drive that likely contains precious data. It’s far better to dedicate an.
If you are working with weather or climate data or big 3-4D model datasets you will undoubtedly encounter netCDF. Unidata’s has been the workhorse data format for atmospheric and oceanographic modelers since the early 1990’s. With more and more scientists using Macs to get their work done, it is important to get them ready with the the necessary tools of the trade. This post walks you through the steps for setting up a Mac to work with netCDF. Our job involves very few steps once the necessary software is installed. Our friend in this and other installations is.
MacPorts is a package management/dependency resolution system similar to apt on Ubuntu or yum on Fedora/CentOS. If you already have MacPorts then you can just type: sudo port install netcdf If, however, you need to install MacPorts then you need to set aside some time for some hefty downloads.
Note that you will need administrator privileges. Here are the steps for installing netCDF on my Mac laptop running OSX 10.8.5. I’m just following the: 1) Install Xcode Open up the App Store application and search for Xcode — the suite of tools for developers. I’m installing Xcode 5.1 which weighs in at 2.18 GB so be ready for a long download.
(You might want to have your Activity Monitor application open and look at the network speed. Now would be a good time to go for coffee.) 2) Agree to Xcode license Once Xcode is downloaded, open up the Terminal app and type: sudo xcodebuild -license Hit spacebar a few times as directed and then type: ‘agree’. 3) Install MacPorts Download the appropriate version of MacPorts from the.
Then click on the package to open up the package installer. After installation has finished you should close any Terminal windows and open up a new one that will now be aware of the new port command.
Try it out with: port help. Port info netcdf 4) Install netcdf libraries and associated tools Each of the following installations will automatically install any dependencies.
Sudo port install netcdf # includes libraries, nccopy, ncdump and ncgen. Sudo port install nco # netcdf operators.
Sudo port install ncview 5) Make sure you have X11 If you are going to use ncview then you need to have X11 installed on your Mac. As of OS X 10.8, Mountain Lion,. The ncview utility and many other Linux based scientific tools still depend on X11. To install X11 just open the Utilities folder on your machine and click on the X11 icon. If X11 is not installed you will be prompted to install it.
This will take you to the where you can download the disk image for the latest version of XQuartz. Once the download is finished, double click on the XQuartz.dmg file and again on the XQuartz package and walk through the installer. The last instruction is to log out and back in again. I’ll be waiting right here for you when you come back.
6) Try out your new toys Whew! That took a while. But take a moment to appreciate the huge amount of work that other people have done to make it possible to install all this software without any system guru skills.
Just to make sure everything is working, lets try looking at one of my favorite datasets —. Download the file — another big download. Once the download is finished you can look at the structure of the file with: $ ncdump -h sst.mean.nc netcdf sst.mean dimensions: time = UNLIMITED; // (2570 currently) lat = 90; lon = 180; variables: float lat(lat); lat:longname = 'Latitude'; lat:units = 'degreesnorth'. So far so good. Now let’s see if ncview works: ncview sst.mean.nc You should see the following: Below this will be a sad little window displaying all of the Sea Surface Temperature measurements that were taken in January of 1800.
Ben Franklin had only begun measuring ocean temperatures a few years before. To see a prettier picture just click on the “” button to walk forwards through history. You might speed through the years before 1850, noticing only that all the ships making SST measurements set sail from England.