Right now I am enrolled in a University Calculus class and my professor has taken a sudden liking to the new TI Interactive software. Sure, I admit, it works pretty nicely, but it costs. He wants us to occasionally play around with the software since it is installed on certain computers in our school (I'm still in high school and he's a visiting professor), but otherwise I would say to forget about it because I don't have the money. I don't know how much you guys have checked out that specific software at Sun Microsystems and I don't know how much you can do in respect to patents and copyrights, but from looking at that software you can perhaps gain several ideas to implement into it. Math right now is just basically a pretty print program, while TI Interactive allows you to add graphs, define and use functions, calculate all types of things, basically everything you can do on a graphing calculator and more. You may want to keep Math as a simple pretty print program, but perhaps you could allow graphs to be inserted and maybe allow a few modes/options to be set to make different parts work together more. I'm still a new user, so I don't know all the ins and outs about it, so I don't know if I've overlooked something in it. The one main thing that you do have a 1 up on TI Interactive is that you can basically treat it like programming. Everything can be typed in to the command box, and it makes it quite easy to complete your task faster. In the other program, you have to select a "Math Box" to type in formulas and other random junk. I don't know. I hope I haven't bugged you guys too badly with what I hoped was a simple solution. Last of all, I have to give an honest compliment to you guys. OpenOffice is, of course, a fairly new product, and as far as I'm concerned, you guys are almost up to where Microsoft is after years of work on their part. I've completely stopped using Microsoft Office now that I have OpenOffice on my computer. I absolutely love how you can save to all kinds of different file formats, including PDF. Microsoft Office can't compare. Go OpenOffice!
Spencer Golze
