Re: e-field software?

[palmer@sfu.ca (Leigh Palmer)]

> Does anybody know of a piece of shareware or freeware software for the
> Macintosh that will graphically show e-field lines for various setups? I've
> tried the ussual sources like AOL and www.shareware.com with no luck.

Blas Cabrera wrote an E-field application for the Mac back in the
Macolden days (ca. 1985). It didn't have the capacity to do what you
want to do, however. I'm learning to program the Mac this semester,
and I want to have an application like the one you suggest. Perhaps
I will write one - after I retire in four years.

Today in lecture someone asked me to draw a few more magnetic field
lines on the diagram I was making (two wires carrying parallel
currents coming straight out at you). I was sufficiently unconfident
of my ability to produce such a drawing without seriously
misleading them that I declined to do so, stating that reason. What
is needed, of course, is a program which will allow one to draw many
more field lines than are usually drawn in the figures that appear
in textbooks.

I would dearly love to have a field mapping program of that sort. A
potential mapping program is, I think, easier to produce (even for
the two-dimensional magnetic example described above). I think the
reason that no application exists is that it is not easy to write
one that will run on an older Mac. I have a Power Mac now and the
problem is, perhaps, more assailable now.

I just started to learn C this semester (I'm an old Fortran user).
This is really a job for a hotshot youngster, not a fossil like me.
I'm sure my son could swot an application out much faster than I
will ever be able to do; can't one of you talented youngsters out
there beat me to this one?

Cabrera's application was cheap, and I believe it was distributed by
Kinko's.

Leigh