MACXAFS - AN EXAFS ANALYSIS PACKAGE FOR THE MACINTOSH

We present an EXAFS analysis package that runs on the Apple Macintosh. (Certain commercial products are identified in the article for the sa ke of completeness. This does not constitute and endorsement by the Na tional Institute of Standards and Technology, the Naval Research Labor atory, or Broohaven National Lab.) The MacXAFS package is derived from a suite of EXAFS analysis programs originally written at the Universi ty of Washington. The MacXAFS package preserves the portable computati onal kernel of this well-tested group of programs and adds a graphical interface by using HyperCard. Communication between the core analysis programs and the HyperCard interface is done by using ASCII script fi les that direct the execution of the FORTRAN-based analysis programs. The user is largely insulated from the FORTRAN code, but instead inter acts with the more intuitive Hypercard interface. This implementation preserves the portability of the ANSI FORTRAN programs, while taking f ull advantage of the platform-specific user interface features of the Macintosh. Computationally intensive programs, such as the ab initio X AFS calculation program FEFF can be executed remotely via a TCP/IP con nection. Due to the clean separation of the interface and the computat ional kernel, this package is readily extensible by writing new progra ms, in FORTRAN or any other language, and adding the corresponding int erface element in the HyperCard stack.