Re: Mathematica: help reviewing my first demonstration

Thanks Hans and Dave for reviewing this.

I made the changes you recommended and uploaded a new version. It is still
in the queue not submitted, here it is if any one wants to review this
version before I make the next step.

http://demonstrations.wolfram.com/preview.html?draft/30421/000004/Failed


Dave said:


I tried it Mathematica 6.0.1 both on Windows Vista and Solaris x86 (64-bit
Intel chip, hacked to run on Solaris). I did not try it on the Mathematica
Player - and there is no player for Solaris x86 anyway.

Here are a few comments.

1) It looks quite different on the two platforms. On Windows Vista the
tabs for all the distributions run into one another, which looks a bit
messy, but on Solaris x86 they look fine.


I changed the tabs to be a pull-down menu, hopefully this will look the
same.

2) The controls are perhaps slightly sluggish on Vista, but fine on
Solaris x86.

That is odd, as it is the same hardware (laptop) and the Mathematica
benchmark score quite a bit higher on Vista than it does on Solaris x86.
But the controls are much smoother in operation on Solaris x86 than they
are on Vista. (I've never been happy with the Vista performance on this
laptop I must say, although it is a high spec laptop which cost over $3000
less than a year ago.)


No comment on this. I am using XP here.


3) Like someone else said, I would capitalise the "distribution".


Done.

4) I think the names of the distributions (Bernoulli, Poisson etc) should
be in capitals too. In many cases, these are propor nouns, as the names of
people.


Done.

5) Have you checked the size of the test image? On Vista, I found your
demo seems too wide. Again, a difference on Solaris x86, where the width
is within the test image size.


I made the whole thing smaller now. ImageSize set to 550.

6) Pushing both controls in the discretUniform distribution to the far
right causes one to become red on the end. I'm not sure it that is
supposed to happen or not (tested on on Solaris x86, not Vista).


Fixed.

7) I don't like the sentence "This demonstration illustrates the use of
Mathematica 6 discrete distributions." Perhaps "This demonstration
illustrates the use of discrete distributions in Mathematica 6"


Fixed.

8) There is no tick label at 0 unless one selects the "Scale P(x) axis to
be 1 always"


This one is hard. I am using the default Ticks genenerated by Mathematica,
and this is how it comes out. Mathematica for some resaon does not put a
tick label at zero from the output of the Plot[PDF....]] by default.

I know there are custome packages out there which is supposed to improve the
ticks layout, but I think this will be beyong the scope of this little demo.
I tried to find an easy way for fix this, but did not see how now, I could
not even find a way to obtain the current tick labels used for a specific
plot. I was thinking if I can obtain the current tick labels, I could modify
them to add a zero label, then update the plot with the new ticks labels
set.

I'm disappointed to see how different it in two versions of Mathematica
6.0.1, but that is clearly not your fault. I'll take a look in the SPARC
version of Mathematica at some point, but not today.

Dave


It is probably hard to have the same interface look exactly the same on each
platform.

Thanks again for your inputs.

Nasser




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