scilab-5.0-alpha-3

Almost there. Not a stable release but close. Unfortunately it’s more buggy than I thought it would be. To start with, I can’t even do

x = 0:0.1:2*%pi;
plot(x,cos(x))

Somehow the application crashes. Nevertheless there are a few things that will be very useful in the stable version ( see changes file).

• Graphic File Export: xs2png. I’m tired of creating ps files that then have to somehow be converted to jpeg or png.
• Input/Output functions: deletefile. Makes you wonder what have you been doing without this function or without createdir and removedir.
• Time and Date. An easier way of keeping track of the date and time for the creation of new files.
• The user interface looks really nice with new tango-styled icons.
• The new java help browser makes the application look like it actually belongs to this century, although it is not yet complete.
• Contrasting with the nice looking console and help browser is the 1990’s kinda looking SciPad. Software as good as Scilab does indeed need a better looking front-end. I hate to use other editors when an application provides one. Hopefully in the near future the development team will realize that SciPad needs an extreme makeover.
• Last but not least. License = GLP v2 compatible. This means free; as in I am free to do what I want.

Looking forward to Scilab-5.0