Develop Nicer Input

[OmarShehata]

This involves both writing equations, inputting points, as well as selecting from a list of premade objects.

[ten2ten2]

What's your idea on how to select pre-made graphs? @OmarShehata

Btw I'll start working on showing nicer math expressions right now.

[OmarShehata]

@pang-tian-yu I was imagining in the dat.gui there would be a button, upon clicking that, we get a modal that covers the whole screen and dims out things outside.

Inside that modal would be a grid of screenshots, similar to how the threejs front page looks like (https://threejs.org/), where each is a screenshot of a graph/shape, and when you click it the modal disappears and you go back to the app with that shape's data filled in.

The reason I like that is because:

• It gives us a lot more space to add a lot more functions (it can scroll)
• It's visual, so it encourages exploration. You might not consider "curved tube" to be an interesting function but seeing it might encourage you to click it
• It gives us more space to add extra features. I don't want to cram the dat.gui with too many options because that might be confusing. But this might be a way of including additional options (such as being able to change the colors or tweak the thickness of the lines. These are things you might want to adjust but probably don't need to do it very often)

This also might end up being a better place to have our input (because it's more space). Consider how much nicer the Desmos grapher looks and feels:

https://www.desmos.com/calculator

Because they give much more space to the input.

[OmarShehata]

Best thing we've found on this so far is Mathquill (http://mathquill.com/) but it's not easy to integrate with dat.gui

[ten2ten2]

Mathquill doesn't actually use usual input bar in HTML. It uses some scripts so that when ever you type it makes what you input in a div. So we cannot use Mathquill unless we modify source code in dat.GUI.

Also it is really difficult to modify UI of dat.GUI. I'm trying to find if there is a better library or can we build one on our own.