By: Erik Vlietinck
Tue, October 16, 2007 - 2:35:00

http://www.wolfram.com/products/player/

With the release of Mathematica 6, Wolfram Research reinvented the way we think about technical computing, for the first time making it possible to create sophisticated custom applications with just a few short lines of code.

Now those revolutionary advances are being extended to interactive publishing, with a new web service that makes it possible to deploy dynamic Mathematica documents that run freely on any compatible computer.

Where before, many interactive Mathematica notebook files (.nb/.nbp) would only run in a fully licensed copy of Mathematica 6, now anyone anywhere can take advantage of the new technology that makes documents come alive, using the free Mathematica Player runtime application.

Publishing with Mathematica and the new Publish for Player web service should be very simple: educators, researchers, and others upload their Mathematica 6 notebooks to the Publish for Player website and instantly get back Player-compatible files. That means that people can now share dynamic content across classrooms and workgroups and publish their work without any software barriers. Mere documents become robust applications--virtually free-standing and cross-platform--in seconds.

Interactive publishing with Mathematica means that homework, quizzes, presentations, books, and research no longer have to be static documents. Publish for Player makes it easy to include point-and-click results, animated 3D models, real-time data from the web, and more--all powered by the built-in Mathematica engine.

“This is a new era for communicating ideas,” said Conrad Wolfram, director of strategic and international development at Wolfram Research. “What Adobe Acrobat did for the electronic document, we’ve now done for the dynamic.”

The free Mathematica Player software and more information about the notebook conversion process are available at: http://www.wolfram.com/player

For hundreds of examples of Mathematica’s dynamic capabilities, visit The Wolfram Demonstrations Project: http://demonstrations.wolfram.com