Getting There, and a contender: Mathination

Hi all,

This Saturday Joe and I will be doing a demo. Check out
the current release at http//touchmath.dyndns.org/demo/demo.html.

These are the current features:
- *, /, +, -
- swapping additive groups
- swapping multiplicative groups
- limited evaluation

These just need a few touchups and the core math is finished.
We'll be improving these with some multi touch gestures and
keyboard input for the desktop. The next step will be getting
this out to some people to play with.

If you've been reading, we've shifted plans. Earlier this week
we discovered that, on the 15th of October, Matthew Self published
his iPad Mathination software.
We haven't played with it yet, but it looks quite good. Kudos to
Matthew Self for releasing first viable contender in the touch-math space.
This is exactly what we had in mind at the start of our project in September.

Before discovering Mathination, we were gearing up to abstract our
tree manipulations to a more functional approach that decouples
operators from code, and lets you define new operators without writing
more code.

But this will have to wait for now. Matthew Self's project puts some pressure on us to get basic algebra finalized ASAP. And I feel confident that we will bridge this gap, pending aesthetics, just momentarily.

Once we do this, we're interested in getting this software out to people learning and teaching algebra. They'll want prepared problems, history, and hints.


Thanks for reading,
Alex

PS you can see it in action here: http//touchmath.dyndns.org/demo/demo.html.
And you can pull the code here: github.com/adc/digiti