Curious - do you have hardware acceleration disabled? Rotating the scene shouldn't be hammering the CPU if hardware acceleration is enabled. [disclaimer: I work at Desmos]
Nice! Really good to know. We'll add that to our list of device/browser combos that might cause trouble so that at minimum we can warn folks. It's an early beta so we're enthusiastically collecting any examples (system configurations and also graphs) that cause problems, so if you see anything amiss we'd love to hear about it ([email protected]). [disclaimer: I work at Desmos]
Since you work at Desmos: is there any way to have animated variables start/stop based on the value of some other variable? Or functions that graph different formulas based on a conditional? Etc.
For example, variable X is continuously cycling between -10 and +10, but only when variable D is > 1. At my son's school, there is a kind of interactive demoscene going on using Desmos (the kids believe that the school cannot block Desmos from the Chromebooks, therefore they will always have it available).
(1) the more straightforward (but less powerful) option is to use the dynamic bounds for a slider. Here, "a" is set to animate, but the bounds don't let it move if b=0: https://www.desmos.com/calculator/mqhhpso67r
(2) the more general feature that allows for complex scripting behavior is called "actions." Here's an example that uses that, where it's more of a genuine play/pause: https://www.desmos.com/calculator/gzqwx36lo0
Despite knowing LaTeX, this is much more intuitive for me when communicating in plaintext. It just matches how I'd write it anyway. In an email I'd always use 1/2 or (f(x+h)-f(x))/h over their LaTeX alternatives.
If, however, the goal is to more easily edit LaTeX -- especially for folks who are less confident with LaTeX -- I suspect WYSIWYG is frequently a better option. MathQuill (mathquill.com), for example, is a fantastic open-source WISYWIG editor for LaTeX.
Disclosure: we use MathQuill heavily at desmos.com, where I work, and have contributed to its development.
Yeah - I think it'd take some serious chops to construct this from scratch (note: it wasn't me! author: twitter.com/teachwithcode). But I've been having a blast deconstructing the equations.
Here's a fun intermediate step (circles instead of hearts), with a few of the numbers parametrized as sliders:
