cocoaNEC 2.0
Kok Chen, W7AY
[w7ay (at) arrl (dot) net]
cocoaNEC 2.0 is a Mac OS X application for designing
and modeling antennas. As indicated by the name,
cocoaNEC uses the Cocoa framework of Mac OS X.
The application is free and it can be downloaded from the
Download page (which can also be
accessed by using the Download tab button at the top of
this page). The Xcode project with the cocoaNEC sources
can also be downloaded from the same page. For
non-commercial use, the source code for cocoaNEC 2.0 is
free.
Online tutorials, reference manuals and example files for
the application are available through the User's Manual tab button. The What's New page lists features
that have changed since the previously released versions
of cocoaNEC 2.0.
The Snow Leopard version of cocoaNEC makes use of the
Grand Central Dispatch technology in
Mac OS X to make use of all the cores on a modern Intel
based Macintosh. This version works on both Snow Leopard
(Mac OS X 10.6) and Lion (Mac OS X 10.7).
The Tiger version of cocoaNEC 2.0 is a Universal Binary
application. It runs natively on both Intel based and
PowerPC based Macintosh computers that use Mac OS X 10.4
(Tiger) or newer.
Except for the graphics elements, the Tiger version of
cocoaNEC uses multiple cores of a processor only when
modeling an antenna at multiple frequencies. The Snow
Leopard version will use multiple cores for other parts of
NEC-2 that are compute intensive.
Please note that the NEC-4 engine cannot make use of Grand
Central Dispatch even with the Snow Leopard version of
cocoaNEC. Except for the graphics portion of cocoaNEC,
multi-core acceleration only functions when you use the
internal NEC-2 engine.