One of the most important features of Maple 8 is the Maplets package and its associated class libraries. They provide visualization tools that produce graphical user interfaces to Maple. For more information, see updates/Maple8/gui and updates/Maple8/packages.

A call to pdsolve/numeric returns a module that has methods for producing 2-d or 3-d plots. For time-based systems, this module can produce animations. For a description of this functionality, see updates/Maple8/numerics and pdsolve/numeric.

The plot routine has been modified so that when the function(s) are evaluated, if their values are complex with small imaginary part relative to the real part, the plot routine ignores the imaginary part.  This leads to improved plots, for example, the ``Folium of Descartes''.

folium := x^3+y^3-3*x*y;

plot( {solve(folium,y)}, x=-2..2 );

The Calculus1 package in the Student package introduces a number of visualization tools for beginning calculus students. For more information, see updates/Maple8/packages.

The plots package contains two new plotting routines, plots[plotcompare] and plots[graphplot3d]. For more information, see updates/Maple8/packages. The plots package also contains a new feature, the Interactive Plot Builder. You can activate this feature by using the interactive command, or by right-clicking an executed Maple expression and invoking the Plots shortcut menu. Through dialogs with check boxes and drop-down lists, you can select plot type and plot features. Maple generates and displays your plot in the worksheet.