Maple Application Center – making life more difficult than they should.
The makers of the big mathematical applications usually have some repository of user-generated code, documentation, examples etc. For example Wolfram Research have the Wolfram Demonstrations Project and the Wolfram Library Archive whereas Mathworks have MATALB Central. I really like these sites and often find myself browsing through them when I need help or inspiration.
Maple is a package that is starting to appear on my radar more and more and it turns out that they have an equivalent code repository called the Maple Application Center. According to the site it has over 1500 Maple applications, tutorials and so on which sounds fantastic. The only problem is that I have to register before I can download anything from it. So I haven’t downloaded anything from it.
Registration is free so you may wonder why I don’t just do it. To be honest, if Maple becomes a bigger part of my life then I probably will but, right now, when I am still at the ‘messing around’ stage of interacting with Maple I just can’t be bothered with registering yet another online account. I have almost a hundred online accounts for various things and I really don’t want to create more if I don’t have to.
So Maplesoft, if you are reading this, why do you insist on me creating an account to access this very nice repository of information? Logging in is, in my opinion, an unnecessary step between the user and the good stuff. Wolfram doesn’t do it and neither does Mathworks so why do you?
Update 26th October 2009: It is no longer necessary to register. Thanks to ‘C’ for letting me know.
FYI, you no longer have to log in to download applications.