On Mon, Feb 2, 2009 at 12:31 PM, Nathan Carter <nathancart...@gmail.com> wrote: > > >> > It would be nice if @interactdemonstrations and cells (both read-only >> > and read-write) could be added to blog entries. >> >> Indeed, exactly. > > Although this definitely sounds cool, I'm wondering what features > already exist that are not this fancy. Here's the limit of my > knowledge on how to share Sage interactive demonstrations, and I'd be > very happy if someone who knew more could enlighten me about the state > of the art in this area: > > If I want to share an interactive demonstration I made with Sage, I > need to publish it on a Sage server to which my target audience has > accounts. Then they need to view the worksheet (which will not show > them any @interactively computed stuff), click "Edit a copy" (which > will then show the @interactively computed stuff), and then play > around with my demo. > > Am I right?
Yes. > If so, this seems a little roundabout. That is, > @interact seems like a public relations dream come true for Sage (like > the Wolfram Demonstrations Project is for Mathematica), but if it's > this tricky to share the @interactive stuff you make, that's a big > missed opportunity. The ideal is to be able to give users a link to > the interactive play space (minimizing the barrier between the user > and the product). > > I realize that, in the OSS community, when suggestions arrive, a > common (and appropriate) answer is, "Good idea! Please build it and > send us a patch!" So forgive me for making the suggestions while I'm > involved in other OSS projects that prevent me from contributing here > as well. But I'm actually hoping that the response I'll get here is > someone's pointing out to me that I'm wrong about the state of the > art, and that something better is actually already possible, and I > just didn't know how. No, you're right about the current state. > > If it's not, then I ask: > - Would it be hard to segregate out a special place on sagenb.org (or > anywhere) for officially published demos (rather than one huge publish > zone)? That would be possible. I hope somebody considers doing something like that, i.e., adding some improved way to organized published worksheets to the notebook (this should be a general feature available in all sage notebook servers). > - Would it be hard to make it so that interactive worksheets are > actually interactive even if they're only being viewed (not edited)? Yes, that would be difficult, but not impossible. I hope somebody implements it. Doing that was one of the goals of a Google Summer of Code project last year, but the student ran out of time, and ended up focusing on other aspects of the notebook (which *did* turn out very well). > These two things together would make it possible for the Sage > community to have something to compete with the Wolfram Demonstrations > Project, which many educators are getting quite excited about, and for > good reason. Except you wouldn't need to download and install a > "player" to use the Sage version, and you could contribute to it for > free. By "compete with" I assume you mean "be better than in some specific way". We could indeed do better than running a Wolfram demonstration; right now doing so from scratch is also fairly roundabout: using a Wolfram demonstration requires downloading the player, downloading the demonstration, then running the demonstration in the player. Downloading the player requires (1) registering with Mathematica (you fill out a form here: http://www.wolfram.com/products/player/download.cgi), (2) solve a math problem to prove you're not a 'bot, (3) read and agree to a 3-page license agreement (of course nobody reads those), and (4) download a 106MB file. I'm in my office at UW and that 106MB download right now takes over 20 minutes. Having interacts that don't require logins or anything is obviously something everybody wants. I hope somebody implements it. William --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ To post to this group, send email to sage-support@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to sage-support-unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-support URLs: http://www.sagemath.org -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
