

Sage 5.6 released - amarsahinovic
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/sage-announce/wa_NL7_8iII/discussion

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zokier
One of the recent ideas I've been playing with is a dedicated (mobile) device
for Sage (or some other maths software). Essentially an overpowered
"calculator". Main differentiating factor compared to running some app on a
smartphone would be a good physical keypad. That would both make input easier
and free up lots of screen estate. Being a special purpose device it could be
even accepted for tests and that way break into the educational market
currently dominated by TI and their 20 year old designs.

With all the recent trends around hardware tinkering, such as 3D-printing and
cheap ARM-boards, I don't think such project would be entirely infeasible, or
even overly expensive.

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throwaway54-762
This is an awesome idea. Please execute on it =). Sage just runs as a web app;
given something in the form-factor of a large phone with hardware keyboard and
a touch screen, you could have an awesomely useful calculator.

Maybe packaging it up as a tablet app would be a good first step in this
direction?

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zokier
sorry about the long post, but you're the first person showing some kind of
interest for this project so I got bit excited :)

I don't think porting to tablets (Android) would help that much. The reason
for that is that Android is so vastly different from regular Linux that the
work couldn't be readily reused. Also designing a good UI for touch-only would
be very different from a keyboard-based UI. That is especially important if
the hardware keyboard is one of the main selling points.

The development of such device could feasibly be divided to three parts, which
could executed partially in parallel.

First would be the software, which I think would probably require the most
work. I'd (re)write the whole UI, designing it from scratch to suit small
screen. Most of the software work could be done on PC, which makes life bit
easier.

Second part would be designing the keyboard. This is bit tricky as it needs to
be designed with the UI and changing the physical layout would be fairly
tedious. So you wouldn't want too many iterations of it. Good thing about the
keyboard is that it could be made fairly independent of the rest of the
system, and be pluggable via eg USB to PC.

And lastly would be putting everything together and on actual hardware. I'm a
software guy, so I'm probably underestimating the work involved here. But imho
it seems like getting basic prototype up and running hardware-wise shouldn't
present too much trouble.

Of course once you reach the stage that you have mostly working prototype,
then the real work begins. Designing a solid case, miniaturizing everything,
optimizing power efficiency, and getting it to run on battery for a reasonable
time. And at the same time honing the software to perfection.

For the hardware I have been thinking following configuration:

* 4-5" 16:9 display. Using widescreen might seem odd at first, but the idea would be that you could have two panes side-by-side to boost productivity.

* BeagleBone as the main board. Simply seems most suitable for the task. Small size, decent enough performance, good Linux support etc.

* Form-factor blatantly ripped off HP 200LX [1], one of the major inspirations for the whole project. I'm quite convinced that clamshell is the superior design for this kind of stuff.

* Case could be milled from aluminium. For prototypes I don't think the cost would be prohibitive compared to alternatives. And I'm not all that convinced of 3D-printed structural parts.

* There could be some kind of expansion port which has some GPIO pins and maybe ADC/DAC or something routed to it. That would allow the system to be used for data acquisition, which could make eg physics and electronics classes more interesting.

And for the software I'd have sage under ipython, and then a custom front-end
for that. The front-end would most likely _not_ be web-based like the current
ones for various reasons. I had also some ideas about running everything under
a tiling WM for multiple workspaces and some other stuff but that's fairly
sketchy at this point.

[1]
[http://www.retroisle.com/others/hp95lx/Pictures/images_95lx/...](http://www.retroisle.com/others/hp95lx/Pictures/images_95lx/hp95lx.jpg)
That's a x86 computer running MS-DOS fitting on your palm. From the mid-90's.
I think we can do something at least as cool today.

~~~
throwaway54-762
> Also designing a good UI for touch-only would be very different from a
> keyboard-based UI

Right, I am assuming a soft keyboard as part of the UI here. But yes,
eventually hardware keyboard is important.

> I'd (re)write the whole UI, designing it from scratch to suit small screen

This only needs to change if your screen is small -- otherwise the sage
notebook seems reasonable at tablet sizes... but yes, if you're aiming at the
Ti hand-held form factor it must be changed.

> I'm a _______, so I'm probably underestimating the work involved here

C'est la vie

> That's a x86 computer running MS-DOS fitting on your palm. From the
> mid-90's. I think we can do something at least as cool today.

Definitely. This project sounds awesome (and also a bunch of work) -- good
luck!

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dbaupp
Does anyone know if there is a summary big-changes release notes anywhere? I'm
a huge fan of sage, but I'm sad that I can't easily follow its development
without sifting through the minutiae of all the "made XYZ hashable" (etc)
tickets.

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zokier
Can't find such release notes, but you can search for "major enhancement"
tickets from Trac, that might give you better overview:

[http://trac.sagemath.org/sage_trac/query?priority=major&...](http://trac.sagemath.org/sage_trac/query?priority=major&type=enhancement&merged=~sage-5.6&col=id&col=summary&col=component&col=keywords&order=component)

Based on the ticket count, combinatorics seems to have gotten most
enhancements.

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ustcscgy
Again, I'd like to say, AXIOM is the most powerful Computer Algebra System.
Its powerful, rich, strong and dynamic type system allows using type deduction
to "prove" (Curry–Howard correspondence). For example, by its implementation
of Risch algorithm, it can prove integrate(sin(cos(x)),x) has no elementary
expression. And it can deal with almost any indefinite integral. try this on
other CAS: integrate(1/(x^3 _(a+b_ x)^(1/3)),x) (there is a lot more...)

