A recent post by Valetta Ventures talks about how hard it is to port LaTeX to the iPad. Basically, the problem is that the code base is old and messy, part of it is written in old programming languages like WEB that need to be transliterated to C, and so on. I think they would stand a much better chance if they tried starting, say, with TeXmacs. I wrote to them about it.
But I think there is a more fundamental issue with trying to move LaTeX forward: while its rendering quality is second to none, it only creates static documents, it cannot integrate graphics, animations, or any kind of modern contents. Ever thought of integrating web page in a LaTex document?
Part of what we are trying to do with Tao Presentations is to capture the original magic of LaTeX, but in a more modern fashion. Below is a very short demo, here is the source code if you are curious.
If you want to hear more about this, please visit us at IC3D in Liege in december. We will be talking a bit about what we are doing with Tao, the programming language, and we hope to demonstrate the first baby steps of Tao, the user interface.
In the meantime, please take a look at our latest demo, YouCube, showing 6 YouTube videos on an interactive cube with sound synchronization.
