- OPENING CDF FILES MATLAB INSTALL
- OPENING CDF FILES MATLAB SOFTWARE
- OPENING CDF FILES MATLAB CODE
- OPENING CDF FILES MATLAB LICENSE
- OPENING CDF FILES MATLAB DOWNLOAD
Finally, while the player was closed, the SWF format was open, and many tools developed around it various toolkits for server-side generation of Flash movies (pie charts and such) before the advent of ActionScript 2, the MTASC ActionScript bytecode compiler, several efforts at open versions of a SWF player. Since the days of Flash 5, the scripting language for Flash has been based on the ECMAScript standard (aka JavaScript), which meant a large crowd of web developers could easily create apps in the SWF format after a minimal period of training. The plugin offered killer apps that rapidly increased adoption: interactive cartoons in the early 2000’s with Flash 4, embedded video with Flash 6 that allowed users access to video sharing sites, esp. Backwards compatibility was an important factor the vast majority of the content developed for Flash 5 was playable in Flash 4.
OPENING CDF FILES MATLAB DOWNLOAD
The size of the download was kept under 1 MB for a very long time even these days, despite addition of H.264 video it is still very small compared to every other plugin. What allowed the Flash player to thrive and become almost universally installed is a combination of factors. Add to that the fact that the plugin is 500MB, and it’s pretty much DOA.
OPENING CDF FILES MATLAB CODE
While I like the idea of an executable research article, containing the source code for the presented analyses, as well as the raw data, the restrictions on distribution are completely stupid. So it’s not closed, as in undocumented, but it’s not open either.
OPENING CDF FILES MATLAB LICENSE
On the other hand, the user agreement states that to monetize the content of a CDF, you must pay a license fee. But it only works when the intended audience is more likely to download the player than the author is likely to write it up in more standard web technology.Ī precision: the FAQ states the CDF spec is public. It’s a way to get people to see a Mathematica document when they don’t have the software. Overall, it’s hard to get too excited about CDF. So if you want to cut and paste, it can be frustrating. The equations look good, as we would expect, but they don’t always select and highlight in intuitive ways. To cap it all off, the typesetting doesn’t seem to be as rich as that of PDF. Basically there’s a place to click on the right margin that expands a block of source code. But it’s not a particularly innovative feature. You can hide source code inline, and that’s nice. I think Processing is probably a better path towards this sort of thing. I’ve seen much better results with Java and HTML5. I downloaded the player and tried out several of the CDFs. So perhaps CDF is a bit like Wolfram Alpha: utterly useless outside of a very narrow field of applications, in which it performs utterly beautifully.īut that’s where the problem lies. Because then authors would know that everyone can see what they produce, without having to download another player. If Mathematica offered an “Export to HTML5” option, they’d sell more software. This includes direct customer support and keeping up with changes to the platforms, security, etc.
OPENING CDF FILES MATLAB SOFTWARE
What does Wolfram expect for such a narrow application? No matter how optimistic they are, why would they want to do this? They have to support this software for a bunch of different platforms, including mobile devices. See that 23% bar for the RealOne player? And that’s for streaming media, a very broad market. I think it will be a challenge to get readers of the NY Times to en mass download another player for their browser just so that they can see an infographic.
OPENING CDF FILES MATLAB INSTALL
Shockwave got people to install it for games. Flash had success because of streaming video. It’s hard to get people to install another player on their computer. There’s only a player for people who don’t own Mathematica (~500 MB download). Although Wolfram says the specification is public, the restrictions are perhaps enough to prevent wider adoption. Arguably, it’s possibly exactly what Elsevier’s Executable Paper Challenge is looking for. Although the same basic results can be obtained using HTML5 or Java, Mathematica makes it very easy to create some types of interactive infographics. On the other hand, web pages don’t print out as nicely as PDFs (CDFs should print out as nicely), and it can be a bit messy to download and view a webpage with embedded apps offline. Then everyone can use it, anyone can modify it, and most platforms will play it. Alternatively, one can simply author a webpage with embedded Java apps, or maybe even HTML5. And right now, Mathematica 8 is the only way to author a CDF file. This is basically just another step in the evolution of Mathematica’s native file format. One the one hand, there’s the xkcd viewpoint. Wolfram is pushing a new document format called Computable Document Format (CDF).