Maple 10, have you tired it yet?

[Townsend]

Maple 10, have you tried it yet?

I posted this in the software forum but I didn't get an adequate response and it was recommended that I try asking the question here.

I currently have Maple 9.5 and I find it easy to get started, powerful and useful. What I was wondering is if anyone has tried out maple 10 yet. I would like to know if there are any significant advantages to Maple 10 in terms of ease of use, interface and useability, i.e. new features. I particularly would like to know about the tutor and assistant features in Maple 10 as they compare to 9.5. I don't have any really good reason to want to upgrade but if Maple 10 has some significant improvements I might do it anyways. I would appreciate anyone's input.

Regards

 

[octol]

I'd as well be very interested in hearing what people think of it

 

[mikeu]

I have used Maple 10 briefly on my university's servers. I switched back to using 9.5 after only a couple of attempts at 10, which was unbearably slow. I'm sure this is at least partly due to the fact that I'm running it through X tunneling over our university LAN, but it is significantly slower than running 9.5 in the same way so I can only assume that the program itself is in fact slower (this is the user interface I mean, not necessarily calculation speed which I didn't really test).

There is a new editing mode which allows you to enter equations as you would right them, i.e. when you type / it underlines what you've just typed and positions the cursor underneath it so it looks like a fraction, or when you type ^ it raises the cursor up to where an exponent should be and makes the font smaller. This sounds good in theory, but I found it ended up being annoying because it doesn't know when to end unless you press the right-arrow key. That is, in the old style you could type a^2*b^2*c^2 to get $a^2b^2c^2$, but typing the same thing now would give you

$$a^{2b^{2c^2}}$$

This makes for enough extra keystrokes in a long equation (i.e. a^2[ra]*b^2[ra]*c^2[ra], [ra]=right arrow) that I switched back to the old style of input. At this point though I decided that if I was using the same features in a slower interface, I might as well return to the old version.

There are two other new features I noted. One is an area in which you can draw symbols with your mouse and it 'recognises' them. I'm not sure what this is for, since not only is the character recognition dismal and unpredictable, but it takes longer to draw most symbols than type the names anyway. The other feature is as far as I can tell essentially supposed to be a fully-fledged document creation interface, sort of like a WYSIWYG TeX editor I guess. I didn't play around with this one too much, maybe it would turn out to be useful if I learned all its features, hard to tell. Can't imagine switching from LaTeX to it though...

I would still like to try Maple 10 installed locally on a reasonably quick machine, but until then I can't really recommend buying it, at least not without first trying it out for yourself...

 

[Townsend]

Well for the sake of PFer's everywhere I took the plunge. I bought the student edition...

I have a well equipped laptop: P4 northwood 3.4. 1024mb dual channel ddr 400 ati radeon 9700 mobility. Hitachi 7200 rpm HD.

Needless to say...it runs pretty good for a laptop.

I am downloading maple 10 as of right now. I will give my impressions after I have had some time to play with it.

Regards

 

[Townsend]

I like it...

Its as easy to use as a Ti calculator but much more powerful...

For example I entered a second order diffeq, right clicked and selected solved and it spit out the answer. I then right clicked again and selected convert then latex and it spits out the latex code...

Now I can copy and paste...here is the DE
$${\frac {d^{2}}{d{x}^{2}}}y \left( x \right) +2\,{\frac {d}{dx}}y \left( x \right) +3= \left( \sin \left( x \right) \right) ^{2}$$

And then the solution that was instantly produced by maple...

$$y \left( x \right) =-1/16\,\sin \left( 2\,x \right) +1/16\,\cos \left( 2\,x \right) -1/2\,{e^{-2\,x}}{\it \_C1}-5/4\,x+{\it \_C2}$$

All I had to do was put in the tex tags, copy and paste...


More later...

 

[Townsend]

After a day of use I would say it has a lot to offer but it is a bit slower like mikeu said...

Overall I think it is easier to use since you don't have to learn as much syntax. The fact that you can easily mix math and text and edit the math on the fly makes for creating a nice math document.

If you have 9.5...there is no really good reason to make the upgrade in my opinion but if you don't mind spending the money it does have some interesting improvements...