January 8, 2002–Mathematica for Mac OS X was one of the exciting new products featured during the opening keynote address at the 2002 Macworld Conference and Expo held in San Francisco, California.
Wolfram Research cofounder and Mathematica front-end developer Theodore Gray gave a live demonstration of some of the product’s capabilities, describing it as a fully native, no-compromise version of Mathematica for the Mac OS X platform. Since its release last fall, Mathematica for Mac OS X has received an overwhelmingly positive response from both users and the media. “Combine the power of OS X with the power of Mathematica and you have a combination that cannot be beat….’I’m inspired by Mathematica, and I don’t inspire easily,'” said a recent MacNETv2 review.
“Everything looks better in OS X,” quipped Gray on Monday as he began by showing off Mathematica‘s remarkable typographical capabilities with an integral demonstration. He then proceeded to show several animations, developed by Michael Trott, that he had rendered in the last week, running them in the background on his PowerBook while doing his regular work. “There’s no way I’d have tried this on any other OS,” Gray said in a testament to the incredible memory management and stability of the Mac OS X platform, “as these animations need to run for days without failing.”
A side-by-side comparison of animations–one generated on a conventional graphics system, the other on Mac OS X–demonstrated the “world-class anti-aliasing” and quality of the Quartz rendering engine used by Mac OS X. The Mac OS X animation was much smoother. The Quartz rendering technology will be available in future versions of Mathematica for Mac OS X.
“Mathematica is to the world of technical computing what the word processor is to the world of writing,” said Gray. It doesn’t tell you what to think today–it is an open box, an invitation to explore, just like the Macintosh. “And we’ve been waiting a long time for an operating system like OS X to really let Mathematica shine,” he concluded.
The Macworld web rebroadcast can be downloaded. You can also find previous press releases about Mathematica for Mac OS X on the Wolfram Research and Apple web sites.