In November, I posted a message announcing that we have been working on an updated version of the Application Center, and invited comments from anyone wanting to check out the beta site. I received multiple comments, both as comments to that post, as well as directly, and we made a lot of changes based on the feedback. Thank you very much to everyone who responded.

I am now very happy to report that the new Application Center is now open to the public!

For those who aren't familiar with it, the Application Center has been around for over 20 years, and it provides a place for our user community to post and share their work. It includes over over 2,700 applications and examples covering a wide array of topics and disciplines, and all are freely available to download.

The previous version of the Application Center was overdue for a refresh. And while we were in there applying a fresh coat of paint, we also took the opportunity to add some new features and capabilities that we hope you will enjoy. As a quick summary of what has changed:

• The look and feel has been significantly updated. It is cleaner, more modern and easier to use.
• In addition to search, user-created collections and tags make it easier than ever to find and discover content.
• Logged-in users can customize the site by pinning their favorite collections and content.
• Logged-in users can also take advantage of their community reputation to help maintain the content in MaplePrimes, and your contributions will now contribute to your reputation scores. For example, when someone likes one of your apps, your reputation score will be increased by 5.
• In addition to Maple content, Maple Flow documents are also now included. The collection is very small right now, but it will grow quickly.

There are plenty of other features and enhancements as well.

So without further ado, I invite you to check out the Application Center and to continue to provide your comments and suggestions!

Bryon

As many of you are aware, the Maple Application Center is a very important resource for Maple users. It is a place for authors to share their Maple work, and for users to have access to a rich collection of over 2,500 curated Maple documents covering a wide array of topics and disciplines.

I am very pleased to announce that we have been hard at work on a new version of the Application Center, and it’s at a state where we’re ready to open it up to the public for testing. You can access the new site here: https://www.maplesoft.com/applications_beta . We are looking for feedback, so please give it a try, and let us know what you think!

Here are a few of my favorite features of the new site:

Updated Look & Feel
The interface of the current version of the Application Center has not changed in many years, and it was time for a new paint job. I think you’ll find that the new site is cleaner, modern, and more enjoyable to use.

Easier to Find the Documents you Want
The updated Application Center provides multiple new ways to find content that is relevant for you. Browse user-made collections of documents or use tags (the same tags used in MaplePrimes) to find documents for the topics you are interested in. Alternatively, you can use the search bar to quickly find documents, tags or authors.

Personalize your Experience
If you are logged-in when using the Application Center, you will be able to customize what you see by pinning your favorite collections, authors or tags to your home page.

Community Moderation & Reputation
As with MaplePrimes, the strength of the Application Center comes from the amazing community of individuals who contribute to it. In addition to submitting your own content to the Application Center, users can now edit tags and create collections of content that others can use. Similar to MaplePrimes, community moderation is restricted to members who have a sufficient reputation score. Speaking of reputation, quality contributions to MaplePrimes will now be reflected in your reputation score. When someone likes one of your submissions, your reputation will increase by 5.

There are many other great new features as well, and we have a roadmap of future updates planned that will make it even better.

I invite you to take a look at the new site and play with it. Browse some content, search, look through tags, and create some collections. Most importantly, I’m really hopeful that you will then use the comments section below to let us know what you think. Did you discover any bugs or issues? What do you like? What do you dislike? What other features would you like to see?

We are hoping to run the Beta for a period of a few weeks, and I’m looking forward to hearing and reading your thoughts. Hope you enjoy it!

https://www.maplesoft.com/applications_beta

Bryon

I have recently taken some questions about MaplePrimes reputation scores, and coincidentally, there was a discussion about it within MaplePrimes yesterday. I wanted to address these issues, and thought that doing so as a separate post made sense.

Reputation was added back in 2010 as a mechanism to track how fellow users value your contributions, and I believe it has largely worked. It's become a great way to acknowledge the time and effort our members put into the community, and I know that many of you greatly value the scores that you have earned. I also know that it is never fun to see it drop, even by just a few points.

To be clear, there are only two ways to lose reputation:

• If someone upvoted your answer/reply and then later rescinded the upvote
• If someone marked your answer as the "best" answer, and then later changed their vote to another answer

This means you can only lose reputation points if someone undoes an action that gave you points in the first place. This is going to happen occasionally. For example, the user may have voted your answer “best”, but as the discussion continued, someone else posted a different solution that the user felt was even better. So you can expect to see small fluctuations from day to day, but the overall trend will be upward. 

That said, members get understandably concerned when their reputation drops, and want to know why. We have always been able to track when reputation changed, but “why it changed” was obscured. Starting today, we have added enhanced logging for reputation shifts. This will allow us to better diagnose the causes when a member is concerned about a change to their reputation points. As well, in the very unlikely event that there is malicious behavior on MaplePrimes, this will give also us the data we need to take action to protect the community.  

We added a small new feature to MaplePrimes that will make it easier to tag other members in your questions, posts and comments.

To use the feature, type "@" in a message. If you wait a moment, a list of names will be populated, starting with members who are participating in the current thread, followed by other members ordered by reputation. You can also begin to type after the "@" to search for a particular member. Similar to the above, members who match your search who are in the current thread will appear first, followed by others.

If you are tagged in this way, an indication will appear in your notifications pane.

We hope you find this new feature useful!

Earlier today, we published an update that improves the way MaplePrimes handles tags.

New features include: 

• There are now tags for Maple Commands and Maple Packages. These tags are denoted with special icons, and cannot be edited. The hope is that these special tags will be useful to anyone looking for assistance with a particular command or package, and will provide another centralized location to find support. For example, a command tag for the plot command will look as follows:.  A package tag looks like:
• The tags page has been completely updated to show tag use over time, and also provides information about specific tags. Users with moderator privileges can also edit tags directly from this page.
   
• Hundreds of inappropriate or 'garbage' tags have been removed.

In addition to the changes to our tagging, we made a few other improvements and updates, including:

• New academically- and techically-focused social networks have been added to user profiles
• Updates to the message editor to improve WYSIWYG consistency
• A variety of smaller fixes and improvements

I hope you find these improvements valuable, and look forward to your comments and suggestions for future improvements.