Future

As the summer starts to wind down, I wanted to write about where Touch of Math is headed in the next few weeks. As of now, I plan to stop working on the project at the end of the summer, when school starts up again. That means I have until then to implement all the features that I want to have done as well as leave the project in a stable and developer-friendly (relatively) state so that it can be used without my maintenance. Of course, I will gladly help anyone who wants to pick up and work on the project to do so, as Touch of Math will not have reached its full potential by the end of the summer.

Anyway I have to get back to work, it turns out these things don't create/fix themselves

Zach

Update

Touch of Math supports basic undo functionality now. Normally we would wait to post until a few more features were implemented (e.g. redo), but I am going on vacation for two weeks or so, and will most likely not be able to work on the project until I return.

Zach

Equation History

Touch of Math now shows you the history of your equation as you manipulate it. As you change your equation, the previous state is frozen and displayed in gray above the current equation. It's basic, but it is a solid step towards the ultimate goal of interactive history (undo/redo, etc.)

On a side note, progress should be much quicker now that we are in the summer session of RCOS, with hopefully little to no other work getting in the way.

Enjoy,

Zach

Variable Substitution

That's right, Touch of Math now has a functional variable replacement feature. This feature allows a user to substitute other values in for existing variables in the expression.

In other news, we had our first RCOS presentation of the semester which, while short, ended with a nice "ooooo" from the audience when we demoed the new variable substitution feature (which was fixed only minutes before the presentation).

Let's hope this is a sign of good things to come.

Zach

New Semester

I would like to start off by apologizing for not having posted here since October. Last semester started off promising but did not result in nearly as much progress in Touch of Math as hoped and was not acceptable by any means. This is the part where I would normally cite lack of time, too much schoolwork, etc. but instead I will move on and just get straight to what did get accomplished and what the plans for this semester are.

In its current state, Touch of Math is able to distinguish between constants, and editable variables. Also, the project is now capable of displaying special characters (right now it's just a few greek letters, like sigma and pi, but the framework is there so it's easy to add more). Another current feature is the ability to have variables with subscripts, by using an underscore, as well as the ability to have multi-character variables by putting them in quotes.

There is one other "feature" although it was more of a proof of concept: the ability to replace variables (only editable ones, not constants) with other variables or numbers. The reason I say it was a proof of concept is the fact that it is only implemented in the front end. That is to say, replacing a variable literally just replaces the displayed html with a different character, and in no way is tied back to the underlying equation.

With that said, let me mention the goals we have for this semester. The first one is obviously to hook up the partially implemented variable replacement feature mentioned above so that it actually works (there's also this small bug where it treats numbers as editable variables...).

The major goal of this semester is to overhaul the way the user interacts with the expression. This involves implementing a way to change which scope the user is manipulating within (moving a variable within a parenthetical statement vs. moving the whole parenthetical statement and interacting with another part of the expression). This is critical to Touch of Math being a fully functional equation editor/manipulator/solver.

Also on the list of things to accomplish this semester is an interactive history. Interactive in the sense that the user will be able to see the equation's history and—thanks to suggestions from fellow RCOS members—they will see the operations performed between that state and the next one (like a little "-2" on both sides of the equation, etc.)

All of these plus additional smaller features not worth spelling out here are on the plate for this semester and with this new year's clean slate so to speak (yes I know it's February), I believe most, if not all, can and will be realized by the time school lets out for the summer.

I leave you with all of that and with the promise of more posts (and soon too, not in four months like this one). In case you don't know already, the whole project is on github at https://github.com/jlabarbera11/TouchOfMath.

Zach

Minor Release

Minor release 0.2.5: https://github.com/jlabarbera11/TouchOfMath

Last week I gave a demo of Touch of Math to RCOS in which I showed off the new (and still buggy) features between the last code release and now. I cleaned up the code from the demo and am releasing it as our promised "maintenance" release.

Now that we have gotten going on the project again, we are excited to be working towards the next major release whose proposed features include:

– distinguishing between variables, numbers, and constants

– variables next to each other signify multiplication

– displaying of special characters (e.g. greek letters such as σ or β)

– displaying of subscripts and multi-character variables

– interactive history (i.e. viewing and loading previous states)

We will keep you posted on the progress of this next major version,

Zach and Joe

Still Alive

Yes, A Touch Of Math is still alive, and we are indeed still developing it. We would like to apologize for the blatant lack of progress since last spring. A Touch Of Math had a longer summer than most, and when you add in our project lead shuffle, we ended up well into Fall.

As we gear things back up, we will be rolling out a maintenance release that ties up all the loose ends from between the last code release and now. This won't have many new features, but it will give us a more up-to-date, stable codebase for us to develop on this semester.

Look out for this update in the near future, we'll post again when its ready,

Zach and Joe