Wolfram Technologies on iOS, iPadOS and visionOS

Welcome to our talk, one of the last talks of the Wolfram Tech Conference 2023. We hope that you have enjoyed the conference and we hope that you have some good memories going forward. We're going to talk about wolfram technologies on iOS, iPados and some things that we are developing for Vision OS. I'm Nick Zitzman from Wolfram Research.

Hi, I'm Rob Rigue Schofield. As Nick mentioned, we work in the user interface department at Wolfram Research on mobile applications. Today we are going to talk about our mobile apps for both iOS and Android. We have the Wolfram Alpha app for both platforms. We have the Wolfram Cloud app for both platforms. And for iOS we have an app called Wolfram Player. And we'll talk about the details of what all those are, some of the features that they have, and some of the new things that we're working on for those applications.

Right, let's start with WolframAlpha for Android, iOS and iOS. Some things have changed since the last time we had the tech conference. We had the app, a free version of the app on iOS before, but the free version has since launched on Android. We have the classic applications that are still available for both Android and iOS, and they're still in both the App Store and the Google Play Store. For now, however, they're in so many permanent maintenance mode, which means that you could still download them, you could still run them, they'll still work, and we are not planning on shipping any new features for it. And there will only be bug fixes if something breaks. We encourage everybody to move over to the new free application, which will continue to be maintained and supported for the near future. Some things have happened since then. We have some exciting news for our international users. The apodicacion ya esta disponibla en espanol para iOS y androi soshite iOS yo apuri iwa nihongode ryokano desu andaroede mo nihongo rei ryo kano ni narimashita. Most of the features of the app are available for free. However, there are some features that will require a WolframAlpha Pro subscription, such as image as input, Mathocr and the enhanced step by step solutions. Now, you can either use an existing WolframAlpha Pro subscription from the website or from your organization, or if you don't have one, you can buy one inside the application for both iOS and Android. And we also have a new feature that we've been working on that we want to show you today. I'm going to switch here to this is the iOS application and it's running on my Mac. You can run the iOS app on your Mac if you have an Apple Silicon Mac. This is what it looks like. It looks very similar on Android. This is the examples view. I can go into an example here, like Chemistry, for example, and I can load an example here and this is what it's going to show. All right, now let me show you the new feature that we have coming up for WolframAlpha for iOS. You might have seen this right here in the corner. That's right. We're bringing the math input query bar that's already up on the website over to the iOS app. I will tap here and this is what it looks like and I can come and clear this out and I can use this just like I would on the website. So if I wanted to get the square root of something like that. And it works. Yeah, just like that. And I can also do something maybe a little more complicated like get the derivative of X squared sine of X, something like that. Right. And then we can get the step by step solutions for that. And yeah, it's exactly the same as it is on the website. It's just now inside the mobile app. And those of you who are on an iPhone, it will look a little bit more compact than this, but it'll still be there for you. And we don't have a release date for this yet. We're still working on this, but we hope to have it out pretty soon. Let's move on to Wolfram Cloud for iOS and Android. Wolfram Cloud for iOS and Android is still the best way for you to view and edit your Wolfram notebooks and cloud deployments on the go. We haven't updated the application very much recently and that's just because the features have been implemented all on the server side. And so any change that shows up on the website is also going to show up inside the application. One change that has happened since the last time we did a well, we talked about the app at a tech conference was that the cloud app now supports single sign on. If you have an account with some other organization that for which you have single sign on with us, it'll just work if you sign into the cloud app. If you have a private cloud, then you can still sign into your private cloud account as usual. Move on to wolfram player for iOS and Mac OS.

All right, so this is an app that will allow you to view your notebook based content on your iPhone, iPad, or if you have an Apple Silicon Mac. The Wolfram Player app also works on Apple Silicon Mac. You can download it straight from the App Store. They have a local kernel with you on your iPhone, iPad, etc. So no network connection is required to do to evaluate interactive content. You can load notebooks that you receive as email attachments. You can download them from websites, you can open them from your Wolfram Cloud account. You can open them from third party cloud accounts from the Files app. Any way that you can get a notebook onto your device, you can open it in the Wolfram Player app. Wolfram Cloud subscribers automatically get access to interactive dynamic content in the Player app. This is a bonus for your Wolfram Cloud subscription. If you're not a cloud subscriber, you can make a one time in app purchase to unlock the interactive dynamic controls. Any of your content, be it typesetting, 2D graphics, 3D graphics controls, interactive dynamic things. Anything that works in the desktop should also work in the Wolfram Player with a couple of exceptions to that being things that use Java or things that use packlets with external shared libraries that are loaded at runtime. And we can't access these technologies just due to limitations of Apple's iOS operating system. So I think now Nick is going to show you some of these features and a few more.

Yes, thanks, Rob. So yes, I'm going to show you something new that we're working on for a future version of Wolfram Player. It is super duper rough because our design team has not had a chance to review this yet. So it's most certainly going to look some somewhat or completely different by the time it gets into your hands. But first let's review Wolfram Player and some of the things you can do. So this is a Wolfram notebook that we have open inside Wolfram Player, currently running on my Mac and as you can see here, it supports math typesetting, it supports our 2D graphics, it supports our 3D graphics as well. I could even spin it around if I do a drag gesture. Dynamics are supported and we even have manipulate. Yeah, you can see that pretty much everything that you can. Well, most of the things you can do in the desktop front end, you can also do inside the Player app as well. Now let's take a look at the new feature. This is the Wolfram Demonstrations project and it's working inside the Player application where you can choose an item there inside the master navigation menu and. Go straight to demonstrations inside the Player application. Let's take a look inside some of these. Let's choose Engineering and technology. Choose mechanical engineering. There are a lot of mechanical engineering demos here. Let's scroll down here, There. Let's choose the radial engine and it will load. Okay. And I can tap here and I can get my manipulate controls down here and even make it animate. I can change the number of cylinders, etc. On the fly. All right, Sorry. One of the other things that you can do here is actually let's go back to the radial engine here. I like this demo so much that I want to make it a favorite. So I'm going to click here and inside the menu in the top right corner here and I'm going to choose Add to Favorites and it is now one of my favorites and they are tracked down here inside this tab. As you can see, I've got a couple of different favorites here, as well as a topic that I favorited, the mathematics topic. Now if I don't want to have that topic favorited, I can click here or I can click back to make it a favorite again. And yep, it'll also remember your history of most recently to least recently open demonstrations. It will remember about the most, about 20 or so demonstrations at most. And then you can navigate in multiple different ways. In addition to clicking up here, I can go to a immediate example over here or I can click see all and I can make lateral jumps between different topics like that. Or I can even go back if I wanted to. But we also have the search field up here and I will tap the search field and if I was on iOS, a keyboard would show up here and I could search for something like polyhedron and it will return to me all of the different examples that we have in our system that contain polyhedrons. And I can tap on one of these and it will load. And there's our example. I can still manipulate it around. I can see. Yeah, like that. That is a sneaky peek of examples inside the Wolfram Player application. And again, we don't know exactly when this will ship, but we're working hard on it and we're. We hope that you can enjoy it when we get it out. I think it will be quite useful in showing the Player app's capabilities. Now I want to talk about something that we are also working on and is a bit more speculative. We are working on bringing our technology stack to the Apple Vision Pro headset, which Apple announced at WWDC 2023. Our existing applications for Wolfram Alpha and Wolfram Player will continue to work on Vision OS just the same way as they do on iOS however, there are a few benefits to bringing an app directly to the Vision OS platform. Here's what Wolfram Player might look like on Vision os. As you can see, the widgets are a little bit different. And one of the other things you can do is you can resize the notebook view, which you, for obvious reasons, cannot do on an iPad or iPhone. We also have some ideas that we're working on, like doing realistic, immersive 3D. And yes, this is speculative, but we're working on something that I think people will like when it. When it comes out or if it comes out. Now, here's the place where I would like to invite you all to point your phones to the screen. If you are have an iPhone or an iPad, or if you have an old ipod touch around, point your phones to the screen and read this QR code and it will take you straight to the App Store where you can download the free version of WolframAlpha for iOS. If you have a Mac, you can also go to this URL or search for WolframAlpha inside the Mac OS App Store and it will also. You can get the Alpha app that way as well. I'll give you a few seconds. Okay, Android users, now I invite you to point your phones at the screen. This barcode here will take you to the Google Play Store, where you can download WolframAlpha for Android and install it on your Android device. I should also mention here that this is the newer free version. If you have the classic application and you haven't downloaded the free version yet, we encourage you to take this opportunity to download the free version. Okay? All right, iPhone users, if you can point your phones at the screen again, there's another barcode that will take you to the Wolfram cloud app for iOS, which you can download from the iOS App Store. Okay. And Android users, if you can point your phones at the screen, this will take you to the Google Play Store where you can download Wolfram Cloud for Android. All right, one last one. This is a link for iOS users. You can scan this to go to download. Wolfram Player for iOS Player app is a little bit larger than the other applications we have, so it'll take a little longer to download. Okay, that's the presentation. Now. Do we have any questions in chat?

So there's, yeah, a handful of questions here in the chat. Dave asks, is there any. Is there a Wolfram Player under development for Android? So we do not have any product announcements to make about that at this time. We are not actively developing a Wolfram Player for Android right now. We have done some work in the past just kind of to test things out to see if it would even be possible. And you know, based on the, the progress that we made, you know, it's technically possible. It's, you know, there's lots of questions around that though, such as, you know, what's the, the business case for such a thing? Which is not something that I can really talk about. But it's, you know, more than zero work has been done, less than 100% has been done and we are not actively working on it at the moment. But that could change. Who knows? Next question George asks, is there any chance of a full Mathematica version for iPad OS? Any chance? Yeah, there's any chance? I don't know that. It's a great chance. It's not something that we are actively working on at the moment. But you know, we have discussed, you know, what are the technical issues preventing that from happening and how would we proceed if we were to decide to want to do that? So it's something that we've talked about. The Player app is obviously a big step in that direction, but there would be a lot of work left to do to get a full version of mathematica for iPad OS. Dave asks, what are the functions that run in Desktop that don't run in Wolfram Player and how does the developer know which functions won't run in Wolfram Player? So there are broad categories of things that we can just say definitively. Anything that uses Java isn't going to work. Anything that uses Library Link to load a dynamic library at runtime isn't going to work. Other things should be possible. That's not to say that everything that should work currently does work. One thing that we find as we are preparing releases and coming up with examples and things like that is every once in a while we will find a piece of built in functionality that doesn't work and we have to figure out why it's not working. And then we realize, oh, there's just this one part of the system we forgot to enable for iOS. We do a little bit of work to enable it and then it works from then on. There are some things like that that's not something that I can categorize as easily as contains Java. So unfortunately I can't give you a great answer. I mean the best answer is to run it on iOS and see if it works. You know, 90 high 90 percentage of everything is going to work. All right, so the next question, will the cloud app for iOS ever be able to directly open downloaded notebooks, even if there's an intermediate cloud import step? Nick, you might have a better answer to this. I had thought that that was something that actually worked right now. Nick. No, no.

And I'd say that. Will the cloud app on iOS ever be able to download to ever be able to directly open downloaded notebooks? I would say that's very unlikely because the JavaScript front end runs on a server and it cannot be used to open local files.

Well, the app could conceivably upload the file to the cloud and then open it, right?

Conceivably, yes. But we, yeah, we just. I don't think we have any plans to do that. I think if you want to open downloaded notebooks, the best way to go is with the Player app right now.

All right. Maybe some built in AR publish style functionality, kind of sort of. Maybe. I think what we would like to do as far as the Player app goes for ar, we have done some AR development for the player app and iOS it hasn't been released yet, but that's something that we have put work into. As far as Vision OS goes, ideally, you know, all of the 3D graphics could be AR on Vision OS. It's not something that we have working at this moment and there's some technical hurdles that we would need to get around, but that's something that would be very, very interesting. All right, what about the differences between the new app and the classic one? Nick, go ahead.

The new application, well, first of all, it's free to download and use. The new application has a redesign in it for the examples, which is lacking in the old version. The new version has several new features in it which are not present in the old version, such as mathocr and. The, yeah, just, just a redesign. And the, the one thing that the classic version can do that the new version doesn't have is the classic version has basic step by step results which are not present in the new version. And you can install both at once. They will not interfere with the, with each other.

All right, okay. Why not a full Mathematica for iPad, which has lots of memory now and computing power. So yes, the iPad is capable of running a full version of Mathematica, but a full version of Mathematica doesn't exist for iPad. We would need to do a lot of work to make that happen, which would be very interesting. You know, it's something that I'd personally like to see and would use, but you know, we need to justify doing a tremendous amount of work. Ipados is very, very different from the other operating systems that Mathematica runs on. So it's just a matter of doing all, all the work. All right. Plans for having 3D visualizations explorable in Apple Vision Pro? That's a very interesting question. It's something that we would all like to see very much. If there's any way that we can make it work technically, you know, we're going to try very hard to do so. We don't have it working right now despite, you know, we, we have put some time into Vision Pro, Vision OS development and we're not there yet. So, you know, the hardware is not going to be released until early next year and maybe, maybe by early next year we'll have more to say about that. But right now it's not quite there. Can notebooks that are running Wolfram Player access the web? The answer is yes. There are a number of Wolfram language functions that have network connectivity that should work just fine on iOS. What?

Wolfram language, etc. Just works inside the player app.

Great. What Wolfram language functions use Java? Off the top of my head, I, I can only think of a few. Like there's some database connectivity things that require Java. You know, there used to be a lot of things, I mean, I think, you know, even things like network connectivity used to require Java, but that's no longer the case. There's more and more of the older Java based stuff is being replaced, but there's still, you know, quite a bit left. I don't have an exhaustive list though. Yeah, I'm trying to think. I suppose one way you could try to figure this out would be to just check whether the, you know, J link process is running on your computer or if it starts up when you use certain functions. That would be a pretty clear indicator that Java is getting used by those functions. All right, could you use work you do for Vision OS to provide stereo 3D plots for desktop Mathematica? I don't know off the top of my head how much overlap there would be to that. Yeah, I'm not sure John has a response there. Our geometry team is working on AR friendly export formats. Okay, so that was in reference to the AR publish comment earlier on. All right, I think we have exhausted our questions and we are just about out of time. So Nick and I would like to thank you all for attending this session. Hopefully it was interesting. Hopefully you have used some of our mobile apps before and if not, hopefully you have. We've piqued your interest. And you will maybe try some of these things out going forward. So thank you very much.

Thank you.

Right, goodbye.