A few days ago we built the millionth version of our software products. For the outside world, we recently shipped Mathematica 6.0.2. But internally we’ve now built a million versions of Mathematica and our other products. I’ve been at Wolfram Research for 17 years, and for the past 13 years I’ve been responsible for our automated product build systems. Every night (and sometimes during the day) a large cluster of computers builds new versions of every product we make. Building a single Mathematica is a complex process, involving a host of different computer languages and systems, and a final Mathematica contains more than 10,000 separate files.

Have you ever created a Mathematica notebook (a .nb file) and sent it to a colleague who doesn’t yet have Mathematica? In the past, you’d have to explain about downloading Mathematica Player. This isn’t difficult, but it is an extra step. Wouldn’t it be better if it “just worked”? Well now, on Windows, it does. Thanks to our longstanding relationship with Microsoft, the .nb file format is now officially part of the automatic Windows File Association system. So, whenever any Windows computer with no Wolfram software gets a Mathematica notebook, the operating system automatically takes you to a download link for Mathematica Player. This is also the case for the published notebook files (.nbp) that have been prepared specifically for interactive use in Player. Only the most widespread and useful formats are included in the Windows File Association system, and we’re happy that Microsoft has now extended the system to include the .nb and .nbp formats. It’s a nice reflection of the growing acceptance of these formats as the standard for interactive documents. On the Wolfram Demonstrations Project we automatically point people to Mathematica Player if they need to download it. But if you post a notebook to a site outside of our domain or if you send a notebook in email, we can’t provide automatic, convenient access to Player for others to be able to view it. With .nb and .nbp included in the Windows File Search system, we don’t have to. Now, anyone can use .nb and .nbp files and have confidence that anyone else will be able to read them. It’s another small step in making Mathematica notebooks---and Mathematica---more ubiquitous.

I’m excited about Player Pro’s release not only in its own right but because of how it will broaden Mathematica’s scope, adding a pivotal deployment stage to Mathematica’s development workflow. Mathematica has increasingly had many elements of a great development environment, particularly since Mathematica 6. Its versatility, modern programming language, Workbench and automated interface building combined with tremendous computational abilities and symbolic architecture make it uniquely suited for quickly building powerful technical applications of any scale. What about the subsequent deployment to your users? For some time, webMathematica has offered an innovative approach, suiting the range of cases where running off a centralized server and interfacing through a browser is what’s wanted. But server-based deployment is not the best methodology for all scenarios. And up until now, local deployment of Mathematica applications has needed each user to have a full version of Mathematica. Today that changed. Both economical and powerful, Player Pro can be the runtime for almost any Mathematica application, with developers “building in” what is Mathematica’s engine to their applications, or with users equipping themselves independently with the Player Pro runtime. For the first time, developing with Mathematica doesn’t have to mean deploying with Mathematica too. Or, putting it another way, Mathematica was the development environment and the runtime all in one. You’ve always needed Mathematica to run Mathematica-made applications. Now you don’t.

For years, I’ve been hearing about the NKS Summer School, and about how productive people find the three weeks of “immersion” there. For quite a while, people around Wolfram Research have been asking, “Why can’t we do something similar for Mathematica?” Well, now we are. This year, we’re offering a two-week Advanced Mathematica Summer School. Partly, it’s going to provide an opportunity for people to learn about all those parts of today’s Mathematica technology that they haven’t had a chance to work with yet. But the most important objective of the Summer School is to help people take their projects and implement them in incredible ways with Mathematica. It’s going to be an intense experience. We’re expecting that during the two weeks of the Summer School, every attendee will be able to use the latest Mathematica technologies to create a final product of some kind---that they and their colleagues, students or customers will be able to use for a long time to come. We’re planning a mix of attendees, with varying profiles---senior technologists, researchers, programmers, educators, students and perhaps others we don’t expect.

I think last year’s Wolfram Technology Conference went pretty well. Lots of interesting talks, and I even got to wear fangs and a tie in preparation for Halloween. I did have a couple of misgivings. The days started early and went late, and in some instances I thought certain simultaneous talks in parallel tracks should have been separated. A colleague of mine felt similarly. We both voiced our concerns to the SPTB (Scheduling Powers That Be). Bad idea---now we’re dragged in for scheduling this year’s Technology Conference. (Some Midwesterners might say “drug in.” But I’m from somewhere else.) As the conference takes place October 11-13, this means there has to be some serious scheduling work afoot right now.