[SnapPea-planning] priorities

[Nathaniel Thurston]

Dear All,

I'm getting a better focus on the potential projects after all of the  
feedback.

In the immediate term, I could imagine three potential projects:
	1. Port SnapPea to MacOSX / Cocoa
	2. bring the documentation and unit tests of the Snappea routines up  
to Sage standards.
	3. make the graphics routines work within Sage notebooks.
I'm not sure about the relative priority of these.  In particular, it  
seems to me like (1) would be substantially easier than (3), and also  
that it would provide a better user experience, but of course it would  
only be useful for people who use the Mac.
Marc and/or Nathan, do you have a good idea about how much effort  
would be involved in (1) and (2)?
Jeff, how much time would you expect to spend on an MacOSX port (if  
you were doing one)?

4. more robust Dirchlet domain algorithm
5. requests (grouped by estimated effort required, and ordered by time
of request)
	a. short-term
		identify dehn-drilling axes in viewer [Bill Thurston]
	b. medium-term
		good drillings view [Bill Thurston]
		integrated hyberbolic viewer [Bill Thurston]
		direct computation of Chern-Simons invariant [Marc Culler]
		more robust generator of short geodesics [Dylan Thurston]
		tube radius function for simple geodesics [Dave Gabai]
	c. long-term
		looking for supergroups of finite index [Bill Thurston]
		detriangulate command: manifold -> link complement [Bill Thurston]
		dealing with non-hyperbolic manifolds [Dylan Thurston]
		rewrite snap in sage (use existing work as starting place) [Nathan  
Dunfield]
		systematic treatment of incompressible surfaces [Bill Thurston]
		handle manifolds with higher-genus boundary [Bill Thurston]
		compute hyperbolic structures with infinite volume [Bill Thurston]