Re: Impressions of Mathematica 6

Dave Seaman <dseaman@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
I have been able to find things by using the search box. My number one
wish is for tabbed browsing.

Some sort of history would be nice, as I find myself getting into loops
as A leads to B then to C then to D which has a link to A, and since A,
B, C, and D all have similar names I'm not always sure whether I've seen
A already.

Each documentation page seems to sit in complete isolation with no context,
so you're at the mercy of whoever chose the "SEE ALSO" links as to
whether you can find your way to where you want to be, or guess that
there might be some "nearby" feature that would be of interest. It
seems to be impossible to simply browse the documentation in any
sort of order.

The "Tutorials" are interesting, yet there seems to be no way to find
out what tutorial documents exist short of having them suggested to you
because you visited a page that links to them.

I have found the search results to be surprisingly useless when looking
for anything in the way of general information. You typically get a
list of low-level function documentaiton pages.

Some searches that I tried included "tutorial", "getting started", and
"unified architecture" which left me thinking that the Mathematica 6
documentation search is almost completely useless.

I cannot imagine a new user being left with only this as their learning
tool for the software. I guess it will sell more "Introduction to
Mathematica" books though.

I've always thought that the documentation browser was one of the best
things in Mathematica. I really liked the way addons could integrate
into it as well.

Oh well.

G.
.

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