Re: [Closed REQ 6010]: Comments on your Software

[daemon]

Well, a couple of good candidates for museum software are the programs
Kali and Kaleidotile, both written (adapted for the Macintosh) by
Jeff Weeks, weeks at northnet.org.  You can get them by anonymous FTP from
geom.umn.edu under the directories pub/software/Kali and 
pub/software/KaleidoTile, respectively.

Kali is a program for drawing patterns that have any of the symmetry groups
possible in the (Euclidean) plane -- wallpaper patterns.

KaleidoTile looks at tilings generated by reflecting triangles across their
edges, in the Euclidean plane, the sphere, and the hyperbolic plane.
The spherical tilings each correspond to polyhedra, so you can construct
families of polyhedra which include all the Platonic and most Archimedean
solids (all the ones with mirror symmetry) on the screen.

Both programs are free.  If you need special adaptations for the museum
environment, you might well be able to hire Jeff to do that for you also.

Most of the other software we have is intended for UNIX machines, and probably
wouldn't fit well into a museum.  (Actually Kaleidotile is modelled after a
program we wrote for the Science Museum of Minnesota, but it requires a
Silicon Graphics Iris.)