With Maple Flow, we’re regularly rolling out exciting updates. Each offers new features, as well as resolving many user-reported issues.

Flow 2024.2 lives up to that track record. Two major new features - drop-down menus and phasors - make their debut. We've also made many other quality-of-life enhancements.

Drop-down list boxes make your worksheets more tactile and interactive. The menu items can be defined in a matrix or vector, or in a table. You can return the index of the selected item, or return an entire row or column of a matrix.

An important use case is populating the contents of a drop-down menu with data from an external file. In movie below, we

• import a database of steel shapes and their associated properties
• then asign the menu items with the first column
• based upon the selected shape, use ArrayTools:-Lookup to return a steel shape property
• and finally perform a design analysis.

If you look carefully, you'll see that you can hide commands on a per-container basis to make your worksheets cleaner.

We have a large number of power system engineers who want to model electrical systems in phasor notation. There have been conversions on MaplePrimes before about phasors

Entering a phasor is easy - just enter the magnitude, the angle character and then the angle. Phasors evaluate to rectangular complex numbers but can be recast to phasor format with the Context Panel.

You can also associate a unit with the magnitude and angle. On output, you can change units inline or via the Context Panel.

You can also prevent floating point approximation of phasors using the symbolic toggle on each container.

We've also made a raft of other improvements. Extracting slices of matrices is faster, and you can now enter units in 2d notation in the Context Panel (particularly useful when you want to change the units of everything inside a matrix).

As ever, the new features are driven by you. The only way you can point us the right direction is by telling us what you want. Don't be shy!