Design Science News

Create math ebooks with MathType and Apple’s new, free iBooks Author app

Apple just released a free Mac application called iBooks Author that allows you to create ebooks that can be viewed on iPad tablets. This is great news for educators looking to prepare classroom materials for classrooms that have iPad tablets. And, we are happy to tell you that if you have MathType installed, you can add equations to ebooks you create with iBooks Author. It works just like it does in the iWork ’09 apps, Pages, Keynote, and Numbers. You can even make the math accessible to students with visual disabilities. Find out more about Adding math to books created with iBooks Author and how MathType works 600+ other apps and websites, in the Works With area of our website.

MathType users interested in making ebooks may also be interested in Scrivener. While it is not free, unlike Apple’s iBooks Author, it allows you to make ebooks that work on all kinds of computers, tablets, and ebook readers, not just iPads.

A sad day

I am extremely sad to report that Robert Miner, Design Science's VP of Research & Development, passed away this morning from liver cancer. I have worked closely with Robert for about 15 years and considered him a close personal friend. Our condolences go out to his wife and son. We will all miss him greatly.

MathPlayer 3 Preview Release 1 is now available!

MathPlayer™ is our free plug-in for Microsoft Internet Explorer (IE) that displays mathematical notation in web pages using MathML, the W3C standard. It also makes math accessible to readers with vision and learning disabilities. Four years ago, MathPlayer 2 broke new ground by making math accessible. Since then, over 12 million expressions have been spoken using assistive technology such as screen readers and screen magnifiers.

We've been hard at work on version 3.0 of MathPlayer. Since the current version of MathPlayer does not support Internet Explorer 9.0, and the new version does, we've decided to make MathPlayer 3.0 available now as Preview Release 1. We expect to add more features in subsequent releases, but Preview Release 1 already has a lot of powerful enhancements:

• Support for Internet Explorer 9 (IE 10 is not yet supported)
• Support for HTML 5.
• Full support for MathML 3:
  • Linebreaks: control over linebreaks and the indentation that follows
  • Elementary math: markup that allows description of elementary math notations such as stacked addition (with carries) and long division
  • Right-to-left math: support for right-to-left notation for math used in Arabic countries
• New accessibility features:
  • Disability targeting. Different reading-related learning disabilities require specialized approaches for reading math. MathPlayer 3 gives you the ability to chose between "Blind", "Low Vision", and "Learning Disabilities".
  • Improved speech. We've added hundreds of special cases to improve how math is spoken.
  • Multi-language support for math-to-speech. The following languages are supported in this preview release:  Chinese, Czech, Dutch, English, Finnish, German, Greek, Italian, Japanese, Norwegian, Spanish, and Swedish.  We expect to have support for more languages in the final release.  If you would like to help out and provide a translation for another language, please contacts us.
  • Subject area targeting. Choose speech tailored to the type of math being displayed.  This release currently supports, Geometry, Probability & Statistics, and Calculus are supported.  The next preview release will allow authors to embed these setting directly in the document.
  • Speech style options: Choose between SimpleSpeak -- designed to speak in a short, familiar, and unambiguous (for blind users)  manner or MathSpeak™ -- designed to speak in a manner that is similar to Nemeth code so that braille users can easily write the braille equivalent when they hear it.
  • Refreshable braille support. The ability to generate braille for a refreshable braille display. Please contact your screen reader vendor to see what their plans are to support this feature.

If you'd like to give it a try, please visit the MathPlayer download page and give us feedback about what you do and don't like. If for some reason, you find problems that gets in the way of your work, you can easily uninstall MathPlayer 3 and reinstall the older version of MathPlayer.

Design Science Needs Good People!

Design Science has been involved in mathematical notation technology for 25 years now! During that time computers have gotten much, much more powerful and the internet has changed our lives enormously. Still, math notation has not changed at all during that time and editing it on a computer remains pretty much the same task. But things are about to change! The rise of mobile and tablet devices, web-based applications living in "the cloud", social media, semantic processing, and other technologies presents a ground-changing opportunity for our company. We envision a world where math is searchable, math can be spoken for accessibility and distance learning, and where math can be copied between documents, applications, websites, etc. as easy as plain text. And that is just the beginning. We see the development of a science of math notation and wonderful products built on top of that science.

Like most technology companies, Design Science is limited not by imagination but by the people that it is able to attract that share its vision. We are looking for sharp people who are excited by mathematics and see the same possibilities as we do. People who want to help us develop a science of mathematical notation and deliver products based on that vision. If you think you can contribute, we want to hear from you. We have listed some of the kinds of jobs we have available on our new Careers page but if you don't see your ideal position we still want to hear from you. Please contact us at jobs@dessci.com to tell us your story. We look forward to working with you!

Promethean Adds Equation Editing Support to ActivInspire

We're pleased to announce that our MathFlow™ equation editor is now part of Promethean's ActivInspire 1.6, enabling teachers to easily create and insert mathematical notation within a flipchart or with an ActivExpression V2. There has been tremendous growth of interactive devices and whiteboards in the classroom, and we're happy to be working with Promethean and glad that our math-enabling technologies have become such an important part of many high-quality teaching and learning products. Our technologies for editing, display and speaking math enhance many of the most popular software products in the world.

MathFlow is Design Science's family of products providing editing, display, and accessibility of mathematical notation for websites, applications, and services. MathFlow components are widely used in education, publishing, and enterprise solutions, as well as commercial products. The technology at the heart of MathFlow is MathML, the XML standard for representing mathematical notation. Since our flagship product MathType also uses MathML, this means that most of the over 500 software applications and websites that work with MathType will also now work with ActivInspire. For more information on using MathType with ActivInspire, see the Equations Everywhere and Anywhere section of our website.