Spectragryph
- optical spectroscopy software -

How it all began

The four design goals

After beginning research doing optical spectroscopy on fluorescent dyes within a physical chemistry group back in 1999, these aspects turned out to be really annoying: Spectral data was tied to the spectrometer hardware. Usually, the spectrometer control software was able to do some amount of spectral data processing and analysis after recording, but there was no means to analyze the data in a separate place (at home, in your own lab at another department). Often enough, spectra processing was equivalent to blocking the spectrometer from data acquisition. There was no efficient way to bring spectral data from different sources together within a spectral processing environment. Most spectrometer systems allowed to export data in some way. Being ASCII type data, you could import them into Origin, GraphPad, SigmaPlot or even Excel. However, while these programs were good at general data analysis, there were no dedicated spectral processing features. Did you ever try to bring an absorbance and a fluorescence spectrum into a single plot, do baseline correction, normalize them to their maxima and zoom around with the mouse? A task at least cumbersome with Origin or SigmaPlot and a nightmare in Excel, especially if there were dozens or hundreds of spectra... Well, we couldn't afford the GRAMS package from Galactic Corporation, and the software from ACDLabs didn't know much about optical spectra at this time. Therefore I took up working on a spectroscopy software tool started by a colleague (Dr. Claus Vielsack) two years earlier.

Since then, I always kept these four goals in mind while developing Spekwin32: 1) Free the data from the spectrometer 2) Bring all sorts of spectra together 3) Visualize/ analyze multiple spectra at once 4) Be useful, or else get out of the user's way Hopefully, these goals were matched enough to provide something useful... For the new SpectraGryph (developed in 2016), I also followed tightly this goals. Actually, a fifth goal could be added: 5) Get user feedback I always keep an open ear for the users' needs, resulting in mail exchange with some hundred individual users year by year. Before starting the current development activity for SpectraGryph, I initiated an online survey for most wanted features, that resulted in over 300 entries. The new Spectragryph software is strongly influenced by these interactions...