Updated Potentials to Xcode 10.2, and up to GitHub
This morning I was looking back at an older project I had on macOS - Potentials, an engine that solves the 2D Poisson equation for a space where you can place conductors, dielectrics, and charge sheets, all of different shapes and sizes, and then use the vecLib CLAPACK call to solve the system of equations very quickly. Finally, it outputs the V(x,y) and E(x,y) to a file for plotting.
I remember writing it on a NeXTSTEP 3.3 Turbo Color Slab, because there was a plotting package that could read the data file, and until I could get around to putting that code into the app, I'd be able to check the results on the plotting package - HippoDraw. Sadly, that app moved to what it is today, on Windows, and I was just not motivated enough to do the plotting on NeXTSTEP.
This morning, I decided to get it out, and get it going on macOS 10.14.4 and Xcode 10.2. I had expected some challenges, and I was not disappointed, but I was also not denied.
The first thing was to allow Xcode 10.2 to tell me of the issues. Some were easy localization fixes, others weren't as easy to see. For example, vecLib has been merged into the Accelerate Framework. So in the code, where I'd had:
#import <vecLib/clapack.h>
I had to replace it with:
#import <Accelerate/Accelerate.h>
And then I dropped the vecLib Framework from the list of Frameworks to link to - face it - it was gone. 🙂 Then I needed to add in the Accelerate Framework to resolve the CLAPACK functions. This was something that I had forgotten to do, but it's really not too bad.
At this point, it built and ran just fine.
I then removed the old origin from the git repo, created a new repo on GitHub, and then pushed it all up there. It's so much more convenient to have it up there, as opposed the old git server that I had running on my own network. Just not even close.
Finish it off with a decent README, and we are now ready to work on writing that visualization of the output that I've wanted. Because it seems that there is no really good open source ObjC graphing packages for flattened 3D plots into 2D, and that's what I need - something that can plot these electric fields in 2D. Something to work on going forward.