Regarding GSoC participation and Mock-up for Khipu

[todd rme]

On Sun, Mar 31, 2013 at 9:29 AM, Percy Camilo Triveño Aucahuasi
<percy.camilo.ta at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi there,
>
>
> On 28/03/13 08:16, todd rme wrote:
>>
>> On Thu, Mar 28, 2013 at 12:33 PM, Punit Mehta <punit9462 at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>
>>>   Hi all ,
>>>
>>>            I would like to introduce myself to the KDE-Edu community :).
>>> I
>>> have been working on Khipu (Advanced Mathematical function plotter) for
>>> the
>>> past 3 to 4 months with the potential mentors of the community Aleix Pol
>>> and
>>> Percy Camilo Triveño Aucahuasi. I have reported some bugs of Khipu and
>>> KAlgebra and also solved some of them with my best possible effort. Right
>>> now , I am looking forward to participate in Google Summer of Code - 2013
>>> .
>>> My basic task of GSoC is to polish Khipu and contribute to it in such a
>>> way
>>> that it can be released in the classroom as soon as GSoC ends. As one of
>>> the
>>> most important feature of any Mathematical plotting application is to
>>> improve its GUI , I have thought of a mock up of a Dialogue and some
>>> additional basic features in Khipu. The attached PNG file contains all
>>> the
>>> necessary information along with the Mock-Up UI. You can take a look at
>>> it
>>> if you wish. :)
>>>
>>>             Any kind of suggestion or improvement is heartily welcomed.
>>>
>>>   Thank You.
>>>
>>>    Regards,
>>>   Punit Mehta
>>> ( IRC nick : punit9462)
>>
>>
>>
>> A few suggestions:
>>
>> 1. It would be nice if there was a check box for logarithmic axes in
>> the plot config
>>
>> 2. What is the difference between "take snapshot" and "save the plot
>> as an image"?
>>
>> 3. Might it be more efficient to have separate sections in the plot
>> configuration for the X and Y axis?  All the check boxes related to
>> that axis (show axis, show name, maybe show units) would be in one
>> section.  This means everything related is visually grouped, and also
>> makes it easier to scale up to 3 axes for 3D plots since it would just
>> mean adding a new section rather than re-organizing the existing
>> sections
>>
>> 4. For plot space, might it be better to be able to add or remove plot
>> spaces, and drag and drop plots between spaces to organize them
>> instead of using the check box for an all-or-none setup?  Or perhaps
>> set it in the plot config, which would allow a single plot to appear
>> in more than one plot space.
>>
>> 5. It might be nice to have a button to expand/collapse the plot list
>>
>> 6. Should "Show tangent" really be a per-line option and not a global
>> option?
>>
>> 7. "Hide/Show" should probably just be "Show" or "Hide" and be a
>> toggle button or check box
>>
>> 8. It might be better to just have "Save as..." where you could either
>> specify an image file format or a khipu-specific format.  It would be
>> conceivable down the road that there could be a plugin that lets
>> gwenview or okular view khipu plots as images.
>
>
>
> todd rme thanks for your suggestions, I like very much the ideas #4 and #8.
> Some of those belong to Khipu but others have to be implemented in analitza
> library. I'm currently in constant communication with Punit to help him to
> understand analitza and Khipu concepts, right now I'm very happy to have
> some help. Also I'm working with a new branch of analitza (newplots) and
> definitly I will take in account your suggestions.
>
> I really hope others members of KDEEdu can offer more suggestions. To all,
> please just think like this:
>
> "what features would you like to have for a math plotting aplication"?
>
> For example: we already have code to plot implicit surfaces and implicit
> curves in polar coordinates (all of this in analitza library, so we can use
> it in Khipu and KAlgebra too)
>
> I've created this page to centralize all the feedback:
>
> http://community.kde.org/KDEEdu/Khipu/Todo
>
> I'm sure Punit will keep focus on that page (to improve his proposal) and I
> always will keep my eye on that page too.
>
> Finally, just to set a distintion: KAlgebra is not about plotting is about
> take advange of some symbolic features of analitza and do basic plots.
> Khipu, instead, strives in manage mathematical objects (suchs curves and
> surfaces) and perform some analisys (mainly numeric but also symbolic) over
> those mathematical objects. So, for example: if you wan to draw the area
> below a curve, you may want to use Khipu instead of KAlgebra ;)
>
> Thanks in advanced to all,
> Percy


I was more commenting on your mockup.  If you are looking for more
general suggestions:

1. There should be options to find the intersections between two
plots, the area between two plots, the minimum and maximum, the local
minima and maxima, inflection points, the distance between two points,
and the length of the curve between two points

2. There should be the ability to use references to other plots.  So
you could have y1 = sin(x), y2 = abs(y1)

3. If there isn't already, there should be nth derivative and integral functions

4. A differential equations plot type would be great

5. When plotting 3D surfaces, you should be able to plot heat maps and
contours, either on their own, below the 3D plot, or as a texture on
the 3D plot.

6. If you are already supporting polar plots, then plots in the
complex plane should also be pretty easy

7. You should be able to use scatter plots with a particular spacing
or manually-specified x-values

8. There should be a parametric plot type, which has equations for X
and Y values as a function of a third variable (t for example).  This
could also be used for scatter plots, where a list of X and Y points
are given

9. You should be able to shade the area above or below a curve or
between two curves