So they say necessity is the mother of all invention... personally I tend to believe its the affections of a woman 
Basicly it started last week, my wife is working on her masters in EE, and found out that the lab at work didn't have Matlab installed for his DSP class. So I told her about GNU Octave http://www.octave.org and she was for the most part thrilled.
The rub is that its a VERY unixy application, full of odd consoles, that don't play well with others and commands that are not always clear. So not to leave her high and dry I started on a GUI wrapper for Octave. http://www.geiseri.com/kdevelop/console.png and http://www.geiseri.com/kdevelop/embedded_input.png are the progress so far. I have the embedding of the engine done, and interaction with the input and help systems complete. My next step is to make the plot() function a bit more friendly. Once I have solved that issue I can start with an IDE... but thats another blog.
Yeah, and I snuck flowers into her office for our anniversary. I am pretty sure that either she forgot, or she figures I forgot, since I have not heard her talk about it for some weeks. Either way, gold star for me. 
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Awesome
I greatly encourage you to keep working on this! I am an Octave user and find it very cumbersome to use. I like how you can just run it via konsole, but GNUPlot is outdated and is hard to use. If you can do something about that, that would be something. Can you integrate it with QtiPlot? I have never used QtiPlot, but it looks highly rated on kde-apps.org
I would be interested in knowing when your code is ready for download. I am interested in testing your software. Thanks.
This really does sound like a great idea
I really look forward to seeing what you come up with for this!
Please keep in touch, I'll test anything you come up with ( een3sae at leeds dot ac dot uk )
Ste
GNUPlot...
GNUPlot is very complete, yes its a pain in the ass to use, but its very complete. I wanted to avoid using ya plotting utiltiy. QtiPlot has some very wacky deps, KMatPlot/QMatPlot is basicly unmaintained, not sure what Kst does, and KChart in KOffice isnt powerful enough.
Currently I have made a Qt widget wrapper for GNUPlot that can do most of what GNUPlot can do, but from a nice QWidget. Stay tuned for this
KChart.
Note that KChart is a koffice wrapper around a pretty powerfull widget which might do more they you thought it did..
see:
http://lists.kde.org/?l=koffice-devel&m=109680890703504&w=2
ps. necessity of loved-one; I completely agree
i could never...
...figure out KChart. I guess it always seemed pretty incomplete. I couldn't even get it to do XY plots, thats a big first step in scientific plotting. I never even tried log/log scale's on the axis, or parametric axis...
Did you try SciLab?
Scilab is another Matlab like application and shares many of its language and its function names, the interface isn't kde-like but seems usable at least.
http://scilabsoft.inria.fr/
not same syntax
>and shares many of its language and its function names
That's the mistake most people do. Did you actually _test_ it or just looked at the screenshots? I've been a Matlab user for years, and I did test it. The language and the syntax, variable orders... is different, even on very basic functions. And both the interface and the way the data is shown on screen are far from nice.
Really octave beats this thing by a lot imho. Not for functionality, but for usability.
yeah octave is pretty complete
not only is octave complete but their bindings interface is so damn easy, its trivial to integrate it into any other application.
its mostly compatible with the unix version of matlab, and its serial io stuff is awesome.
koctave
I wonder if you've seen this before beginning your code
http://bubben.homelinux.net/~matti/koctave/
It's not the most impressive gui I've seen. Actually I believe the most un-user-friendly thing in octave (and koctave too) is that it uses gnuplot for plotting.
And the best thing about it, it's that it uses Matlab syntax, so one can port code easily (Matlab syntax is quite friendly too compared to most other math tools I've seen)
At some point we'll get the long-awaited Matlab replacement for KDE/linux
yes
this was the reason i started my own project. other than being dead, koctave has some serious issues wrt to usability. Its basicly Kate and Konsole.