[SnapPea-planning] Finishing SnapPea 3.0

[Nathan Dunfield]

Nathaniel,

Great to hear that you are interested in working on SnapPea.   Let me  
give some quick answers now, with perhaps more once I've thought about  
things a bit.

> Two things need to happen first, both involving the current users of  
> SnapPea:
>
> 	1. The most obvious task is to continue adding old features into  
> the current OSX application until it can do everything the old one  
> could, but I'd like to ask around first.  Dylan, for example, would  
> like it to work on linux.  Are there other requests?

In my opinion, a Linux version is probably the greatest need after one  
that works on OS X.  Longer term, a new version that runs on Windows  
might be a good idea.   I don't know whether the current Windows port

http://home.att.net/~Manoharan/SnapPea/snappea.html

is/will be maintained (the source code is not posted, unfortunately)  
and it's missing some of the graphical features of the original Mac OS  
version (IIRC no pictures of Dirchlet domains).  Note: the Windows  
port does run find under Wine on Linux and OS X/Intel and I have used  
it as a stop-gap on those platforms.

> Who should I consult regarding ideas about the requirements for the  
> next version of SnapPea

One additional person you should definitely consult is Marc Culler (culler at math.uic.edu 
), to whom I've taken the liberty of cc'ing this message.   Marc is  
currently working on a new, better, Python interface to the SnapPea  
kernel, using Pyrex/Cython instead of writing the wrappers by hand.   
He has some of the graphical features working, including Dirichlet  
domains, a very nice link editor, and some preliminary horoball  
stuff.    See some pics here:

http://dunfield.info/temp/screen-part.png

He used the cross-platform Tk library for this, so it could form a  
basis for a new GUI, but that is not (I think) his motivation at the  
moment.

More broadly, Saul Schleimer is heavy user of SnapPea who might have  
some ideas on this.


> , or grant funds for the purposes?

The most reasonable person to contact at NSF is Joanna Kania- 
Bartoszynsk.  I'm not sure how much the NSF likes to fund this sort of  
thing, since, while it is clearly needed, it may seem to them like  
maintenance, which they try to avoid, I think.  One might have better  
luck with one of the smaller foundations like AIM or Clay or Jim  
Simon's new Math/Physics thing.  Bus Jaco used to be pretty tight with  
the head of AIM, for instance.

> Does anyone want to participate in the process of deciding what  
> should be done?

Yes.

	Best,

	Nathan