3D-XplorMath specifications

On major reason for this release is to make available additions to the documentation. There are now ATO (About This Object) texts for all objects in the following categories: Plane Curves, Space Curves, Conformal Maps, Parametric Surfaces and Fractals. We also corrected a serious omission: one documentation folder was empty by accident in the previous version and this has now been fixed. There are a number of improvements to the program features that involve the anaglyph images: in particular Phong shading was extended to anaglyph, and the anaglyph button now handles all anaglyph cases. The behavior of the 3D-axes was also improved. Switching to dot cloud rendering is no longer handled in the Action menu; it is now treated in parallel with wire frame and patch style in the View Menu. For a few objects the program switches automatically to dot cloud rendering but returns to the previous style if a new object is selected. Since the size of pixels on modern monitors has decreased, there are now more situations were pressing a number key will switch to dots of that size.

The ODE Category:
The Forced Duffing Oscillator (1D, 2nd order) has been improved in that the orbit computation and the Poincare map are fully synchronized. One can run the Poincare map and then toggle to orbit computation, which superimposes the orbit over the Poincare image. See the ATO for details. For two-dimensional first order ODEs, one can now switch between different numerical methods in the Action Menu. Also a demo-mode has beens added, illustrating in a visually self-explanatory way three simple numerical methods.( The Runge-Kutta demo does still needs verbal explanations.)