I just got a smartphone, amazing. Wouldn't it be wonderful to have a mapleprimes app to conveniently view and post messages from a smartphone or a smartpad or whatever? Any plans to set one up? (I'm on the android platform)

The other suggestion/question I have is: any plans (by Maple or others) to make a Maple calculator widget? I'm currently using RealCalc, which is great, but it  doesn't have the advanced term-grouping capabilities of the Maple calculator.

I notice that a Seach on this site for the word "cipher" fails to show this result as a hit. Why is that?

It is by no means the first time that a keyword Search on Mapleprimes has failed to return a hit for an old comment/post/answer of mine. I'd really like to know why there are so many such misses.

The upload utility does not allow extension .mpl, which is ubiquitous for Maple script files.  I could change the extension to .txt, but that is annoying (I never name Maple script files .txt).  As a workaround I can and do zip the file.

I am returning to Maple after a bit of a dry spell (I'll post about that in another posting) and see that each posting summary seems to be more about avatars and big thumbs than about content. I don't actually care about thumbs up or down; it's content that I want to know about. If 10 people think the post is not helpful, and I think that it is helpful, that's what counts. And it seems to me that the posts might be ordered by thumbs, and I'd like to see date order. Maybe I...

I ran an advanced search in the application center at maplesoft and I'm not sure that it works properly.

Under advanced search I left the search field blank and selected MapleV to find all applications submitted for MapleV.  The first thing that happens is that it comes up with applications rated for newer versions of Maple.  Then it asks to click here to search our archived Maple-related applications (prior to Maple 10).

So I do that but it only produces...

Aren't the acceptance numbers for various badges just way too high? Mapleprimes has only had 2 (one each) Good Posts at this date. And no Good Answers or Great ones of either type. But that's clearly not right, as the new site has had lots of great posts and answers. This same issue was raised long ago, and the admin response of long ago was that it would be revisited.

And there...

Stop ordering posts based on the number of thumbs up. 

It's certainly not fair when someone comes up with an original idea that causes a flurry of other great ideas only to have yours shoved to end because it got less up votes.  It gives someone else all the credit and I'm not a happy camper.  My post got deleted because it had a down vote and got shoved to the very end. 

Mapleprimes page order is out. 

Okay, I decided to dig back into the beginning of mapleprimes pages.  So one would logically think to go to the last page here on mapleprimes ... that would be page 200.  So off I went and to my surprise, nothing is in order.  I expected to find posts in a logical order from first to last at least from 2006 or so but instead I'm finding pages labelled as new as 2009 there. 

Maybe we could have a button...

Just looked at the badges pages (clicking on the corresponding tab at the top).

88 people (including me) earned Tumbs-up badge, but only 50 people are listed there, and it says "page 1 of 1", there is no 2nd page - and unfortunately I didn't find myself there.

Even more interesting - clicking on most earned badges - such as 1st questions etc. - there are many pages, but only the first page for every badge have people listed - all the other pages are empty.

A couple of days ago I found out that gzread from the zlib library can be used for fast reading of binary files in Maple from the disk to memory - about 100 times faster than readbytes - something like in the following simplified example, 

A:=Array(1..2^26,99,datatype=integer[1]):

time(writebytes("A",A));close("A");

                                9.360

B:=Array(1..2^26,1,datatype=integer[1]):
time(readbytes("A",B));close("A");

                                8.065
B[1],B[-1];

                                99, 99

myreadbytes:=proc(f)
local gzopen, gzread, gzclose, n, p, A;
gzopen:=define_external('gzopen',
    'path'::string,
    'mode'::string,
    'RETURN'::integer[4],
    'LIB'="zlibwapi.dll");
gzread:=define_external('gzread',
    'file'::integer[4],
    'buf'::REF(ARRAY(datatype=integer[1])),    
    'len'::integer[4],
    'RETURN'::integer[4],
    'LIB'="zlibwapi.dll");
gzclose:=define_external('gzclose',
    'file'::integer[4],
    'RETURN'::integer[4],
    'LIB'="zlibwapi.dll");
n:=FileTools:-Size(f);
A:=Array(1..n,datatype=integer[1]);
try p:=gzopen(f,"rb");
if gzread(p,A,n)=n
then return A end if
finally gzclose(p)
end try
end proc:
time(assign(C=myreadbytes("A")));

                                0.062

C[1],C[-1];

                                99, 99

'time(myreadbytes("A"))'$5;

                  0.078, 0.062, 0.046, 0.046, 0.046

E:=Array(1..2^26,2,datatype=integer[1]):
time(ArrayTools:-Copy(A,E));

                                0.093

That needs some tweaking, because that works only on uncompressed files. If a file ("A" in this example) was gzipped, then the gzread would ungzip n (uncompressed) bytes in it in this example, instead of copying it into the memory - but it is not a big deal, in general.

Does anybody know about a similar replacement for writebytes? gzwrite doesn't work for copying (it compresses the array.)

I used the zlibwapi.dll library from http://www.winimage.com/zLibDll/index.html, it is a version of zlib 1.2.5 (written by Jean-Loup Gailly and Mark Adler) built by Gilles Vollant. The code is for a 32-bit system (Windows). That should work in 32-bit Linux after replacing that dll with standard libz.so.1, as well as on 64-bit systems after replacing integer[4] with integer[8] in most places.

Read and write English  is a strian!

Just a suggestion to make it easier to determine wether a question is still open or has been answered.

I have noticed there are many questions that have not been answered throughout mapleprimes history so here I am suggesting that a small yellow circle in front of the question denote an open question and a small green circle to represent answered questions.

Sometimes I come across unanswered questions, and it is still open but looks like it could be answered. ...

Under the Recent tab where you select Your Contributions.  It does not show all my posts.  Why is that?

Specifically, one example, my post on Wordle is not shown when I select My Contributions.  The only way I can see it is if I use All posts.  Please fix.

It's a new school year and traffic is up.  Just wondering what happened to the student maple forum?

Also as a suggestion, some forums have sticky's, a post that stays at the beginning of the forum where users can generally find welcome information and helpful starter hints, yes it's impossible to cover everything but something would be nice for the new users. 

Is there a way to get told only once that  "There are new updates on www.mapleprimes.com that match your notification subscriptions:" ?

I always receive 3 (when I do get any), and yes, they are identical.

3 times is better than 0 times, though.