The Future of MATLAB and Mathematical Interpreters – Going Mobile?
MATLAB has existed on the desktop and remains there to this day. However as the popularity of the iPhone and the buzz of the Apple tablet, Andriod phones, etc has pointed out, there are a large number of users who want to migrate to a mobile platform. Will MATLAB? Will any mathematical interpreter?
An interpreter may not seem an obvious choice but I can recall, along with many others, pulling out my calculator frequently during courses and for homework. Recently, I came across the iPhone app, iMathlab, on sale from the app store, and while it’s a light weight version of MATLAB or Octave, it’s a true mathematical interpreter made for a phone! As an engineer I can now make a phone call, plot a normal distribution, generate a random sample and make a histogram of data and then jump back onto my call all in a single device.
While the phone may not the ultimate form factor, it’s simply too small to work for any lengthy period of time, the upcoming tablet does seem to offer a more suitable form for the user who wants to seriously buckle down on their platform for 10 to 20 minutes at a time.
This raises the idea as to where will interpreters migrate in the upcoming years? I, personally, have been wondering when an open source project will migrate to a Google App Engine to take over a server and offer a dynamic interpreter capable of calculating with the vast server resources maintained by Google. Need a small lab comparable to Los Alamos? It’s there waiting for you to tap its potential.
With smart phones, a forthcoming tablet, and other web services taking over a larger and larger segment of the computing world it’s going to be a very interesting and dynamic area of software and services to see where and how any number of mathematical tools move into this area.
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