Pros
It does most of what I want a polyhedron tool to do (and a whole lot of other things that I haven't got round to playing with yet). It makes it easy to create polyhedra that I'd never seen or heard of - makes math dreams into virtual reality!
Cons
Sometimes Stella crashes on me when I'm asking it to do really wierd things. I can usually find a workaround, though. Sometimes I think it might be nice to have even more control over some details -- well, Rob always reads next-version email tips.
Summary
Even if your love is for making real polyhedra you can hold and turn in your hands, this is a great tool to use on your way there. It lets you see the shapes you've been thinking of, turn them, cut them, stellate them -- whatever! -- and then it can print your nets for you.
Starting to use any math program can be a little wierd -- polyhedra aren't very much like words, so no polyhedra program can ever use your regular word-processing set of menues. Still, after a little while I was in there and playing. At first I thought Stella's manual skipped too many details, but Rob who wrote the program is a great believer in finding things out for yourself -- sort of Crocodile Dundee attitude, you're a resourceful loner in the great Australian Outback and you can make it if you try -- but I've come to accept his way of handling the manual. He gives you enough tips to get you going in the direction you want to go, and you can fiddle with his menues until you find how to do what you'd like to do. Stella is small and fast -- you can open several instances simultaneously, so you can have one with your "serious" window and a few others to fool around in finding out which submenu does what.
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Pros
excellent interface and very functionable (awesome geo specs too)
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Reply by nevenp on March 24, 2006
Are you a developer of this program? If you're not I have no idea what is it that you find so great...
Pros
The built-in set of models is fantastically thorough, plus you can make new polyhedra yourself using a wide variety of on-screen tools. This program is well worth the $75 for the fully functioning version.
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Summary
This is great for visualizing isometry groups of polyhedra and their relationship with their duals. You can easily see things like the rotations in the selected group and its orbits of faces and vertices (via the dual polyhedron). What's more, you're not limited to doing this on the computer screen as the facility for printing nets helps you to make your own physical models, and it's always so helpful to be able to hold one and turn it around in your hands. Every mathematician (especially group theorists), student or professional, will find this program very entertaining, and from an educational point of view, useful as well. It is well designed, easy to use, and together with the web site, the principles are very well explained.
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