One of the challenges of developing Mathematica is resisting the urge to spend all my time playing with the graphics toys I create. A lot of what I do results in features so fun to explore that they jeopardize the further development of Mathematica. I’d like to point out a few of them in this blog, starting with a simple but profound change in the behavior of Mathematica graphics: direct graphics output. In previous versions of Mathematica, the result of a Plot or other graphics command was the abbreviated form  - Graphics -  that represented the symbolic output. The actual graphical image itself was spit out like a watermelon seed as a side-effect of the evaluation and was not associated with the symbolic output. In Mathematica 6, the output and the image are one and the same, behavior we call “direct output” to contrast it with the “side-effect output” of previous versions. This simple change in behavior underlies much of the interesting new functionality in Version 6.

Now that Mathematica 6 is out, I can finally talk about an amazing site we’ve built with it---the Wolfram Demonstrations Project. The Demonstrations Project is a collection of interactive visualizations made using Mathematica 6. You can preview the Demonstrations on the web and download them to run in Mathematica or the free Mathematica Player. We began the project last year, when Stephen Wolfram realized that the dynamic capabilities we were building into Mathematica 6 would allow users to create and share new interactive content much faster than ever before. From an initial seed of a few dozen, the site has already grown to almost 1,300 Demonstrations, with more pouring in each day. And if you have Mathematica 6, making your own Demonstrations is as easy as completing and uploading an authoring notebook. Any Mathematica 6 user can participate. The Demonstrations are all open-code, so you can even see how each one is built (usually with just a few short lines of Mathematica). Take a few moments to explore the site. It’s grown so much that even someone like me---who works on it full time---is constantly surprised by what’s there. It has everything from interactive addition tables to molecular models and more.

Explore 3D graphics. Watch calculus being done. Create your own computer-generated art. I can’t wait to see how the new methods of education, research and collaboration that the site enables take form in this exciting publishing medium. The site’s features and the collection of Demonstrations that you’ll find there now are just the beginning. I hope you enjoy what we’ve made, and that you’ll let us know any ideas you have about it.