On December 21 2011, we released IPython 0.12 after an intense 4 1/2 months of development. Along with a number of new features and bug fixes, the main highlight of this release is our new browser-based interactive notebook : an environment that retains all the features of the familiar console-based IPython but provides a cell-based execution workflow and can contain not only code but any element a modern browser can display. This means you can create interactive computational documents that contain explanatory text (including LaTeX equations rendered in-browser via MathJax), results of computations, figures, video and more. These documents are stored in a version-control-friendly JSON format that is easy to export as a pure Python script, reStructuredText, LaTeX or HTML. For the IPython project this was a major milestone, as we had wanted for years to have such a system, and it has generated a fair amount of interest online. In particular, on our mailing list a us...
Thoughts and notes on open scientific computing, with a focus on Python-based tools (IPython, numpy, scipy, matplotlib and friends). By Fernando Pérez, UC Berkeley Statistics and Data Science Professor. Website at fernandoperez.org.