## The closest that I can come, to making Maxima On Android display an animation.

Maxima On Android really wasn’t designed, either to allow interactive rotation of 3D Plots, or, to allow animated, 3D Plots. But let us put ourselves in the position that it is the chosen Computer Algebra System, and that the user wants ‘interactive 3D Plots’.

What Maxima On Android has to offer natively, is a 3D Plot, but displayed from a static perspective. In fact, I’ve read that the way it works is, that Maxima On Android plots to a PNG File, and then displays the PNG File in a secondary window, from which the user may switch back to the CAS window / worksheet.

Various efforts I’ve made have failed, to get the viewing window for the plots to animate. One possible reason could be, the possibility that Maxima On Android actually waits, until the entire worksheet has finished executing, before allowing the viewing window to be opened. Repeated, iterative plotting locks up the app, until the loop has finished, at which point, at best, the last version of the plot can be viewed.

The following was the best that I could do, to get this port of Maxima to plot interactively:


i: 0$Frame():= block ( plot3d(sin(%pi*(x+(i/4)))*cos(%pi*y), [x, -1, 1], [y, -1, 1]), i: i + 1 )$

Frame()\$



This Maxima Batch File / Script requires some participation by the user, to work. The user may Load it from within the Maxima On Android GUI, after which the first iteration of the plot will display. After that, the user needs to tap on the ‘Back’ arrow, to get back to the worksheet. Then, tapping on the last ‘Frame()’ command, will cause it to display in the command field. Then, tapping ‘Enter’ will cause the next iteration of the plot to appear.

From the second point on, in the process, that the user has tapped on the ‘Back’ arrow, the command ‘Frame()’ should still be in the command field. Therefore, ‘Enter’ can just be tapped again, and the process repeated as often as desired.

(Updated 7/05/2020, 10h50… )