I’ve changed the name of Algebra Explorer to Alvigra (ALgebra VIsualization and GRaphing tool). I wanted to call it Alvi, which sounds like a furry Disney character thereby making it kind of cutesy and easy to remember, but alvi.com was already taken by some incredibly lame website that does nothing useful other than redirecting people to a bunch of other really lame commercial websites. So, Alvigra it is. Yes, Alvigra sounds a little bit like Viagra - I don’t know if that’s going to be a help or a hindrance. Maybe it will help with marketing to the older male math teachers.
Anyway, I now have an alvigra.com website and I put my latest release up on it. Alvigra can now display fractions and can do a little (teeny tiny) bit if fraction simplification, but I have a lot of room to improve in that area. Also, the user interface is pretty sucky and display and animation options are pretty much non-existent - but at least it displays equations and animations pretty much the way I want them displayed.
Now that most of the basic parts are in place, I’m going to try to spend the next couple of weeks or so trying to make Alvigra a pretty decent tool for simplifying basic algebraic expressions. That means filling in a lot of holes in the math processing and then doing a lot of testing and then filling in even more holes. However, once I get all that done, Alvigra will actually qualify as a pretty useful tool as is - even if it only functions in a pretty limited area.
Then after I have Alvigra working reasonably well as an algebraic simplifier I’ll add in solving for variables and then (maybe in early January) put in some simple graphing.
Pretty exciting, eh? Well, anyway, it kind of is for me at least.
Yea me…
