I purchased Origin at least 5 years ago, and I remain impressed with the
product. I have not upgraded or used it extensively, since our main in-house
platform is the Macintosh. Although your latest mailer states "Power
Macintosh" as a supported platform, this is through SoftWindows, correct?

For our in-house use, this might be sufficient (although a PowerMac-native
version would make adoption more realistic). However, I have a larger
application in mind. Our company manufactures information systems for the
waste treatment industry. We package together software and instrumentation
for data analysis and reporting; our market is international, both
municipalities and industry.

I would like very much to distribute Origin as part of that analysis
package. I cannot even consider it, however, until you have a Macintosh
version. Is this under consideration/development?

If you would like some insight into the Macintosh scientific and engineering
markets, I can point you to some resources.

Speaking as a software development and marketing manager, I can say that the
Macintosh segment of our market is a minority, but a very important minority.
On average, our technical support people spend 60-80% LESS time in telephone
support with our Macintosh clients. We have never had a hardware
compatability problem (serial port conflicts, IRQ problems, drivers, etc.)
with the Macintosh segment; in contrast, we have to fight through
configuration problems with _every_ Windows client.

I encourage you to strongly consider Macintosh development. Thank you.

I, too, have heard good things about Origin. I hear it knocks the socks off of
Kaleidagraph and Excel, which are the two programs I use most extensively for
data manipulation and graphing. As a scientist, I spend a lot of time in this
area, and anything which would increase my productivity would be most welcome.
So, please come up with at least a PowerMac version (more preferably a fat
version that runs on the older machines).

The last post suggested an OpenDoc part. I think that this would be a
fantastic idea. I have worked at a NASA site and I know that many of the
scientific groups are spread out between KaleidaGraph, DeltaGraph, Excel,
and Igor.

If there was a serious contender that could bridge the ease of use and power
gap between some of these products you would have a winner! And if it was
done as an OpenDoc part, then the researchers at the USDA Forest Service I
now work with would be able to work from their Mac, OS/2, Windows, and AIX
platforms using the same application.

Availability on multiple platforms is very important in my environment.

Staff and students in our School generate lots of spectroscopic data,
most of which gets plotted using Igor. While Igor can generate great plots, it
is not that easy to use. Origin looks a lot easier and that would make us
consider it as a replacement for Igor. As for 680x0 versus PowerMac, we still
have lots of 680x0 machines in use and will do so for some time. I've done
some work recently with Metrowerks CodeWarrior (which incidentally is a
great development environment supporting both Mac and Intel machines)
and that makes fat binaries easy to produce.

I hadn't notice this forum before so I mailed you guys at tech@microcal.com
A Native Powermac version would be very nice. A powerful, easy, and intuitive
graphing program for the mac would be great. I can't believe we own 5
different programs to fulfill our graphing needs for publication. I can't
understand why most of Harvard Medical School related labs are still using
Cricket graph on the mac for their graphing needs. I guess there hasn't been
an easy graphing program to come along in like 8 years?

I have been hoping/waiting for a Mac version for (literally) years.

Too bad for both Microcal and the Mac community.

Another voice of agreement from Harvard -- there is *NO* outstanding
scientific graphing program for Macs. Our lab too hobbles along on
Cricket Graph, and would love to see Origin ported to the PowerPC!
We need a spreadsheet/graphics program with a good interface, ease
of use, speed, excellent output, and curve fitting. Origin seems to
fit the bill, and I think the market would be excellent.

This post is on behalf of the embedded technical software development
group at Heartstream, a medical device manufacturing company. We would
be very interested in a PowerPC native version of your product.

We are heavy users of MATLAB, and after months of frustrating crashes, memory
leaks, general protection faults, and a complete inability to complete large
batch jobs, we punted our Pentium PCs and switched to PowerMacs. We are
now running trouble free with all of our MATLAB code, with much faster
execution at a lower price. Amazing! Unfortunately, we are left with
products like DeltaGraph for plotting. JMP has been very useful for data
visualization, but its graphing capabilities are marginal. The market calls
out for your product!

Please let us know if you decide to pursue a Mac release. We are
interested buyers/beta testers, etc.

I have recently become aware of your software, Origin. In my company we have
been using Excel and Cricket Graph then switched to Excel and Delta Graph a
few years ago in an attempt to satisfy our scientific and engineering graphing
needs. We would love to be able to go beyond the limitations of those two in
a single package. It seems, from what I have read and heard, that your
software does that.

The fly in the ointment is that we are very predominantly a Macintosh house.
I believe that we would use a program like yours extensively in Engineering,
Test and publications sides of our firm.

As VP and director of engineering, I have been looking for something like
your software to take do more efficiently what Excel and Delta Graph cannot.

I hope to see a PowerMac version of your software soon.

I too would like to support a PowerMac version of Origin. I work with numerous
engineers, scientists, and veterinary researchers at Virginia Tech who use
Macintoshes and are constantly looking for high quality scientific tools to
help visualize information and prepare publications.

Although I am probably not unbiased, since I am an employee of Intel,
as an Origin user I would like to comment that I think a MAC port is
a waste of effort.

Far too many software companies spend far too many resources
trying to keep a MAC port up to date. It is questionable how many
more sales result.

Moreover, even if the MAC sales result at the time of the port,
the effort of continuing to maintain a MAC port detracts from
the enhancement of the main money making product - which I assume
is Origin on Windows.

Me, what I want from Origin is more features, like better integration with
Microsoft Word, concurrent update, better directory handling (which
I just made a problem report about), etc., etc. I *like* Origin, I hope to
use it for a while, but Origin is neck and neck in competition with
several other graphing and data analysis products, and if Origin falls
behind I will switch.

(Which, I suppose, might be a reason to port to MAC - less competition
in that market, as software companies increasingly find it not worthwhile
to keep up.)

I agree with your idea that a PowerPC version of Origin on the Mac would be
more valuable than a 680x0 version. But you may not need to make that
decision.
The current Mac compilers are -- I believe -- good enough that making a fat
binary version is not much more difficult than a PPC version. So it may not
need much extra effort on your part at all (except for machine testing, I
suppose).

I have heard very good things about your product, and would love to see it on
the Mac. I agree with a previous post that you will make more money per sale
on a Mac version because of *far* less tech support costs. I also think that
even you may be surprised at how snappy the performance of your software will
be once you take advantage of the superior floating point power of the RISC
PowerPC chips.

I would also like to add my vote for a Power Mac version of Origin. If your
product is indeed as good as it looks and other say it is, it would be a
welcome addition to Macintosh customers. As a current user of SigmaPlot, I
would love to see someone else join the Mac market that provides better
support for Macintosh technologies. With this in mind, I would love to see
you start work on a Mac OS version of Origin that incorporates support for
QuickDraw GX and QuickDraw 3D. By incorpoarting these 2 key technlogies now,
you will already be ahead of most other Mac developers when it comes to
developing a MacOS 8 version of your software.

Here's another request for a PowerMac version of Origin. Having just been
faced with creating a number of charts and graphs of scientific data in Excel
and ClarisWorks for some technical papers (see my web site if you want to
know how the Newton's new print recognizer works), I would dearly love to see
a full-featured spreadsheet, data manipulation, and graphing tool aimed at
scientific users.

As a previous poster indicated, building for 68K Macs vs. PowerPC Macs with
modern tools is truly trivial. You just tell the compiler which processor
to target, include the right set of libraries and headers, and "make" the
project. So you can sell to owners of the older 68K machines as well, for
almost no additional effort, assuming your codebase is predominantly in a
higher level language. And while I do believe your assumption about serious
scientific users being on PowerPC systems is valid, I suspect there may be
some legacy equipment in school labs and such, the owners of which might
legitimately be considered potential customers.

I would like to add my voice to this chorus of support for a Macintosh
version of Origin. Looking through your Web site, this looks like a truly
powerful piece of software, and it deserves to be ported to a truly powerful
computer. Making Origin cross-platform will also make it more desirable to
PC users, since they often work with Mac users, and common software will
increase their collaborative abilities.

I am the information technology coordinator for our physics department, and
I can assure you that there would be interest in such software, since almost
every professor has a Macintosh on their desk. Most still have 680x0 Macs,
though, so a Mac version would be most useful if it were a fat binary, as
others have suggested.

Hi
I agree that Origin seems like an easy to use yet powerful tool; I was
suprised that I had never seen it before. While comparisons to other
apps like Igor, StatView, SuperAnova, and SysStat are appropriate,
I think that your main market would be Excel, CricketGraph, and
DeltaGraph users who are looking for more meat but hoping to
maintain simplicity and ease of use.

I receive many questions about stats software, but most often the
answer to the user's problem lies with their adopting UNIX server
telnet sessions, where the researcher had first learned SPSS. The
complexity of existing Mac stat clients discourages them from
learning new tools, and the perceived benefit is always lost when
they have to use multiple tools for the job, or move off the client.
I think if you focused on making a true Macintosh application, you
would create a mass exodus from other applications which have
never successfully implemented the ease of use concept.

I use DeltaGraph for a multitude of tasks, but after multiple
transmorgrifications it still has bugs and creeping featuritis as they
struggle to understand what slot they are trying to fill. Many
researchers continue to make custom algebraic solutions inside
Excel, because they can't take the time to find a more efficient way.

Trim down by not increasing graphics capabilities; just export
multiple formats and let the illustration apps carry their own load.
The Main reason I purchased DeltaGraph was because it was the
first Adobe Illustrator, export-capable, graphing tool that I found.

I think that Origin could find a warm seat waiting inside the
Macintosh market. PPC first, 68X if demand.