Many of you know that I am, let's say, committed to emacs, and certainly not a big fan of the notebook. However... it does do at least one thing really well, and that is @interact.
I am writing code to numerically compute period matrices for Riemann surfaces, and the first step includes a little of graph theory in the plane: one wants to determine paths around specified branch points with nice properties. So, of course, I started working up the routines and using interact to view the outputs. Unfortunately, it's not exactly a great experience, the actual developing of interact code. (In fact, I went back to emacs and static graphs.) But http://wiki.sagemath.org/interact is really, really cool. So cool, in fact, that I think the sage community needs to work harder to make this feature even more awesome. Can we open the floor for some discussion of this feature? Here are some things I want: * I want to be able to "pop out" or "anchor" an interact and have it update a div that's permanently glued to the right side of my browser, floating to be always visible. I'm no web design guru and even I know that this is not difficult. The motivation is that I have hundreds of lines of code computing the relevant bits of the interact, and I have to keep scrolling around to find the new picture. This would let me anchor the output and edit more sanely. (In fact, there's nothing special about an interact cell for this: almost always, I have one "doit" cell at the bottom that I want to run after edits, and I could anchor that cell for ease of use.) * I want to be able to compose interacts. That is, I'd like to build a library of interacts: one that allows me to specify an input graph using that neat javascript graph editor (this is good for points in the plane and for paths in the plane), one that allows me to specify a function, a nice "range slider with variable endpoints and steps" (notice how often that comes up in wiki/interact?), etc. Then I can just glue the inputs together. * I want these amazing interact examples to be included in the sage library, as incredibly cool building blocks for future interacts. * I want the wiki page to be truly interactive, i.e. to link to sagenb. This stuff is just way too cool to be static. To all the people who have contributed to the wiki/interact: bravo. Next time I need to impart a little calculus wisdom, I'll be there. Nick --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel URLs: http://www.sagemath.org -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
