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Grapher

Grapher is a software program bundled with Mac OS X v10.4 and 10.5 that is able to create 2D and 3D graphs from simple and complex equations. It includes a variety of samples ranging from differential equations to 3D-rendered Toroids and Lorenz attractors. It is also capable of dealing with function and compositions of them. One can edit the appearance of graphs by changing line colors, adding patterns to rendered surfaces, adding comments, and changing fonts and styles used to display them. Grapher is able to create animations of graphs by changing constants or rotating them in space.

History

Before Grapher and Mac OS X, Mac OS 9 was bundled with Graphing Calculator, a similar program to that of Grapher that was bundled with over 20 million Macintoshes since 1994 with System 7. All versions of Mac OS X prior to Mac OS X v10.4 have been missing a bundled graphing calculator application. On July 22, 2004, Apple bought Arizona Software’s “Curvus Pro X”, and re-named it “Graphing Calculator”, before deciding on “Grapher”. The news was publicly announced on September 15, 2004 at AppleInsider

Version 2.0 of Grapher is bundled with Mac OS X v10.5.

Features

Grapher is a fully featured graphing calculator, capable of creating both 2D graphs including margins, classic, polar, lin-log, log-log, polar log and white as well as 3D graphs including frame, gradient, white, cylindrical system, spherical system, black and white and blank. Grapher is a Cocoa application which takes advantage of Mac OS X APIs. It also supports multiple equations in one graph, exporting equations to LaTeX format, and comes with several pre-made equation examples. It is one of the few sophisticated graphing programs available capable of easily exporting clean vector art for use in printed documents (although exporting 3D graphs to vector is not possible). Animation of graphs is also supported in both 2D and 3D, generating a QuickTime file.