- Why Newt?
-
Newt was named after Sir Isaac Newton, the founder of differential calculus and
indubitably one of the greatest scientific minds of all time. More about Sir Isaac,
and some references to books about him, can be found in the About section of
Newt's help.
- Can I download a copy of Newt to use at home?
-
A limited version is available
on this website for downloading. This version is limited in the
sense that you are restricted to a chosen set of functions, but
other than that, all the modules are fully functional. This
should be enough to give you a good idea of Newt's capabilities.
- How do I go about organising a copy of Newt for my school/university/course?
-
We're so pleased you've asked this question :) The person to contact regarding this
is James (james@flat502.com).
- Is there a list of known bugs?
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Yes. It's here.
- What language was Newt written in?
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Newt was developed using Microsoft Visual C++ (version 5).
- What are the chances of Newt being ported to Linux/Unix?
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Currently, quite small. We'd love to bring Newt to the Linux world,
but it's quite an investment in terms of time and effort. However,
that doesn't mean it will never happen, it's just not our first priority
at the moment.
- Is a printed user manual available?
-
Yes. The person you need to get in touch with is Clare
(clare@flat502.com).
- I've found a bug in a section of Newt which is critical to my course. What do I do now?
-
Unfortunately few software projects are ever truly complete, and we've
yet to meet a developer who can claim to produce bug-free code. The first
thing to do is check this site to see if the bug is known, and if so, if
it's been fixed in a newer release. If this is the case, then contact
us to get an up-to-date version. If, however, the bug is known, but not
fixed, or has not yet been discovered, then please let us know about it.
If it's absolutely critical you we'll do what we can to get a patched
version to you as soon as possible.
- When I copy images to the clipboard they're on a black background. How do I change this?
-
Check under the menu. There you can instruct
Newt to invert images before copying them to the clipboard. This will change the
background to white, but bear in mind all other colours will be inverted too.
It's a good idea to experiment with different colours. Alternatively, if you're
going to print in black and white, setting all the plotting colours
( menu) to white.
- Newt seems to be plotting sinxcosx incorrectly. What's wrong?
-
Because of the precendence in Newt's evaluation engine, sinxcosx
is evaluated as sin(x*cos(x)). This is essentially an arbitrary choice.
Since we can't have it both ways, we must pick one. For the majority of cases, this
way makes more sense. Just remember to enter this type of expression with an explicit
multiplication symbol.
- Why are all the images on this site in PNG format?
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Unisys own the patent to the GIF format, and recently have requested all websites uses
images in the GIF format to pay a royalty in the region of a couple of thousand dollars.
This is insane, and is a poor attempt to cash in an outdated patent. Regardless, however,
PNG is a far better format, offering better compression (lossless just like GIF), more
flexibility, multiple alpha channels, 32 bit colour, and a whole host of really nifty
features. It's also free.
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