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GNU Octave Gets a GUI
jones_supa writes "GNU Octave — the open source numerical computation suite compatible with MATLAB — is doing very well. The new 3.8 release is a big change, as it brings a graphical user interface, a feature which has long been requested by users. It is peppered with OpenGL acceleration and uses the super fast FLTK toolkit for widgets. The CLI interface still remains available and GNUplot is used as a fallback in cases where OpenGL or FLTK support is not available. Other changes to Octave 3.8 are support for nested functions with scoping rules, limited support for named exceptions, new regular expressions, a TeX parser for the FLTK toolkit, overhauls to many of the m-files, function rewrites, and numerous other changes and bug fixes."
In the past year, I've never seen a time when Mathworks wasn't hiring hundreds of people. They even run sponsorships (read: ads) on NPR all the time about how many jobs they have.
How does Octave or any other open source tool hold up against something with so many resources behind it?
I'm asking honestly. I know Apache and Firefox certainly do pretty well, but the former has a huge business community using it, and the latter has an enormous consumer user base. How do smaller projects compare to big software tools? For example, isn't it generally understood among graphic artists that Gimp doesn't measure up to Photoshop?
Scilab is far better and always had native 3D graphics, a GUI and a simulation engine: scicos/xcos. It atonishes me that it is systematically ignored. Is it because is french?
* In most cases. I used to manage an octave and a matlab library and there were plenty of places in the code where we had to fork the code on a test "Is this octave?" to call the right function.
I have the complete Adobe suite. I use Gimp more often. Photoshop, like MS Office, is the de facto file exchange format in certain fields. Photoshop is also much slower than Gimp and in my opinion harder to use, hiding commonly used tools like rectangular selection underneath other tools.
Neither is BETTER in an absolute sense. Most professional software engineers use/used C. That doesn't make C better than JavaScript.
Personally I switched from Matlab to python with spyder as the GUI interface and I'll never look back.
it has one ALREADY
I have been using Qtoctave for a VERY long time
the current in SUISE12.3
---
Repository: Packman Repository
Name: qtoctave
Version: 0.10.1-2.28
Arch: x86_64
"I don't pitch OpenSUSE Linux to my friends, i let Microsoft do it for me
From experience, when doing my thesis:
For my thesis, I had to implement something (DSP) which was part of my advisor's doctorate. This entailed computing a whole lot of constants for a FIR filter. My advisor had implemented this using symbolic computation, which apparently worked up to MATLAB 2007, but not any more on more recent versions. When I tried his code on the school computers, I got no answers, or the code kept on running, so I could not obtain implementation constants for this filter.
Well, symbolic computation did not work either on Octave, but I could install it on all my computers, so I did not need to either buy a version, run with an illegal version or only do my computations in school.
I solved the problem, by the way, using convolution, which was much faster, and always worked.
I suppose that the main reason for people using MATLAB professionally, is in the more advanced tools which are built on top of the basic layer, like Simulink and model-based design, which are missing in Octave. Anyone know how SciLab stacks up in this region against MATLAB?
I used Photoshop a long time ago on Macintoshes. It was supremely intuitive to use. GIMP today is much worse than Photoshop of old. I've recently paid the Adobe tax (wife has a business that requires it) and the new Photoshop is a nightmare. Current versions of GIMP and Photoshop are both non intuitive and break the expected select/act behavior.
The same is true of illustrator. The current interface is very unclear. I purchased a book to get past the initial confusion.
I don't understand the rationale. They don't explain it. The manuals should perhaps start with a "Look it works like this and here's why" section. It's so much easier to follow the logic of a UI when you understand what the rationale is.
Of course it could just be bad design.
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
Ouch, GIMP is a usability disaster since they separated Save As and Export. I use Save As, every. single. time. And then realize it's wrong every. single. time. I am unable to override decades of muscle memory, even if I consciously know I should not use Save As in GIMP.
Photoshop is only considered usable because people train themselves to use it. For someone who does use Photoshop often, trust me, its user interface is bizarre, unintuitive, and just plain wacky. It's like WordPerfect 5.1 in the way you have to just memorize how to do things. Then the user interface makes perfect sense, because you've trained yourself in how it works. It seems obvious if you've practiced and use it all the time.
JASC Paint Shop Pro, up to version 9 before it was sold to Corel, was the only intuitive graphics program I've ever seen. It had one flaw which is why I never use it any more: You can't resize the selection rectangle.
Corel PhotoPaint used to be good, too, except it was slow, slow, slow, slow, slow.
The cost of using Gimp is not really zero. At least, if you are coming from a Photoshop background. You have to invest some time (surprisingly little!) in getting to know the software. It is, however, very capable software and the out-of-pocket cost is nil. It may be that investing some time is a good business proposition. It has been for me, as an independent graphics artist.
I find Gimp to be a very capable application. My workflow isn't, in any way, hampered by choosing Gimp in stead of Photoshop. Yes, that took some time, and at times it was a steep learning curve. But I wouldn't go back to Photoshop for the kind of projects I do. I'd feel cramped if I'd have to.