On Sat, Nov 21, 2009 at 1:10 AM, Simon King <[email protected]> wrote: > Hi! > > If I am not mistaken, Mathematica calls it "manipulate", while > "interact" is Sage's brand. Sorry if I got this wrong.
Correct. Mathematica has a command "Manipulate" that is similar to Sage's @interact decorator. I made up the name "interact" because it more clearly expresses the intent, and sounds less sinister than "manipulate". > Admittedly my memory for those things is not good, but I think I > remember that Sage had that feature before Mathematica. In that case, > let us hope that Sage does not end like the inventors of the > telephone, Philipp Reis (first public demonstration of a phone link in > 1861) and Antonio Meucci (first presentation of a device in 1860 > [without a phone link] and first patent application in 1871 [but > running out of money, so, his caveat expired])... I would say that Enthought was a real pioneer in this feature with their "Traits" system long, long before either Mathematica or Sage had this capability. So maybe the chronology is: 2002 (??): Enthought traites, which makes it really easy to make interactive gui's to manipulate data/python code -- this is a core (but open source) technology that Enthought developed as part of their business model. 2006 (?): Mathematica's Manipulate is introduced, I think in Mathematica 6. It's declared by Wolfram to be the most important innovation since the wheel. 2007: We had a joint Sage days at Enthought, in which there were several excellent talks by Enthought'ers about how Traits works and what it is. Seeing this, I coded with little sleep for a week, and wrote Sage's @interact. This has been subsequently polished by Igor Tolkov, Jason Grout, and many other people. I want to emphasize that Sage's @interact owes something to Mathematica's Manipulate, but a lot more to Enthought's Traits. I had tried to do something like Mathematica's manipulate before that Sage days, but just couldn't figure out how to do it; however, when I learned all about Traits suddenly the solution was clear. William > > On 21 Nov., 09:06, cool-RR <[email protected]> wrote: > ... >> Is there also an option to change things not by form elements, but by other >> actions like mouse dragging? For example rotating a 3D Plot or moving around >> items? > > Dragging 3D plots with the mouse is standard in Sage. > > If you create a 3D graphics object and display it then by default it > is shown by "JMol". Interestingly, it was developed by > biochemistrists, for showing large molecules. But it can be used more > general. And JMol provides the mouse-drag feature. > > In some cases, you would use a different way of showing a 3D object, > namely using a ray tracer. This would produce a static picture, but it > is only used if you want it. See the relevant pages in the manual. > > Best regards, > Simon > > -- > 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-support > URL: http://www.sagemath.org -- William Stein Associate Professor of Mathematics University of Washington http://wstein.org -- 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-support URL: http://www.sagemath.org
