Re: [matplotlib-devel] release strategy and the color revolution

[Michael W. <mw...@st...>]

I've made a second notebook that uses the IPython interactive machinery to
let anyone play with the parameters and explore different ways of setting
them. you can download the notebook with that here:
http://nbviewer.ipython.org/gist/mwaskom/842d1497b6892d081bfb (I made it
using IPython 3.0rc1; I'm not certain if it will work on the 2.x series;
sorry if that is the case).

This stays with the general approach in the original notebook of using a
linear ramp for chroma, which again maybe is not what we want. But it
should let you get a better sense for the parameter space.

As I said in the email to Olga, I think (a) I would advocate fairly
strongly that matplotlib should design a custom colormap as its default,
and (b) I think this approach (a cubehelix-like map in Hcl space) is a
principled way of doing so (though maybe not optimal). But both of those
points are independent of whether you end up going with the particular
parameters that I used to generate the original proposal -- I have my own
domain on which to impose my personal aesthetic preferences, and I don't
need to take over matplotlib too :)

(But I do think it's worth distinguishing the matplotlib default from the
matlab default.)

Michael