Grapher versus Graphing Calculator

[mmcirvin]

Many people have reported that Graphing Calculator is back in Tiger under the name of Grapher. Actually, Apple's Grapher isn't the same program; it's adapted from one of Graphing Calculator's competitors. The original is available for OS X now as a commercial program, and there's a free light version as well.

Grapher seems extremely powerful as an animated grapher, maybe even more powerful than the full Graphing Calculator. But what it's missing is the calculator feature. The original Graphing Calc was useful even as a simple expression evaluator; I would and sometimes still do bring it up just to calculate something. Typing in a complex expression algebraically was often more convenient than banging it into either a regular or RPN calculator. It could also do a few extremely simple symbolic algebra tasks (such as shifting quantities from one side of an equation to the other), though I never found that very useful.

Grapher also isn't as intuitive. Graphing Calc's user interface was so simple you didn't need any instructions; you just typed the equation you wanted and the thing would figure out what to do with it. You never had to plan in advance what kind of graph you wanted or whether you wanted one at all. Grapher actually makes you switch between modes to do different kinds of graphs.

Comments

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Hey, I just spent a whole lot of time unsuccessfully trying to figure out how to make Grapher graph an equation in spherical coordinates (without just incorporating the transform to Cartesian or cylindrical). Any ideas how to do that?

The prefs seem to indicate that the polar angle is called lower-case-phi, but that doesn't seem to work.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Huh, you know, I think this is a flat-out bug. I tried using the template for a spherical parametric surface, and that didn't work. Then I tried the one for a cylindrical parametric surface, and it didn't work until I changed the phi to a theta. I think somebody's confused over whether the azimuthal angle should be called phi or theta, and it's futzing up all the 3D cylindrical and spherical coordinates.

[(Anonymous)]

Finally someone who has noticed this bug - been looking all over the web for comments on it.
As you say there is a mix-up in the naming of angles. However I found that if you open the examples files (for instance Torus-knot) and use the spherical/cylindrical coordinates in that window phi suddenly works as expected.