MacMost Now 704: Grapher

Hidden in your Applications/Utilities folder is the complex graphing program Grapher. You can use it to plot 2D and 3D equations on your Mac. You can also export 3D animated graphs. Very useful for math students or those who use complex equations in their work.

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Video Transcript: Hi, this is Gary with MacMost Now and in today's episode lets take a look on the app that comes on your Mac called Grapher. So, Grapher's this little application hidden away on a Mac. You can find it if you look in your applications folder, in the utilities folder, and then you can see the application Grapher right there. So, this app allows you to graph different equations. For instance, lets start with a default 2D graph right here, and lets type an equation. So a simple may be x and then do tilde above the six to square it. Hit return and we can see it graphed here, and listed here. You can add additional equations to the same graph by hitting the plus button here at the bottom. So you can just create another one here. Just do a simple line, like that, so we can see we have both of them here. In addition there are tons of examples that you can choose from if you want to get used to it. So, for instance, if you wanted to just do a parametric curve right here, you can bring up this example here that shows you several different parametric curves here on the left, and you can turn them on and off to view them individually. Like that. You can also create a new 3D graph, so we'll do that here with the default 3D graph, shrink the window, and you notice that the 3D space actually rotates here. Let's create a quick equation. Maybe a little more complex. And you can grab and drag the graph here and even kind of leave it with a spin. So we'll do some of the examples for instance of 3D. We're going to go into this 3D primitives here. And you can see. You can grab, drag around, and spin it a different way. The cool thing you can do is you can actually create an animation so you've got this going on here. You can go to Equation>Create Animation and here you can say create something that's 10 seconds long. You can set the start position, and the end position for something, and create it. And what you'll get is this little video here you can actually play and see the objects rotate. And then you can save this out and have a Quicktime movie. If you really want to dig into it you can go to Help, and go to Grapher help, and there's a pretty comprehensive user guide here that you can use to explore it even more. So my main intention here is just to let you know that Grapher exists, and if you're a math geek like I am, you can explore it and see how you can use it. 'til next time, this is Gary with MacMost Now

MacMost Now 704: Grapher

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