Obviously, they feel like they have the ability to take Mathematica from being the niche product it was for many years to being a platform that tools such as their popular apps and now the CDF can be built on top of. It’s fascinating to watch the growth of Wolfram.

You can see the ambulance move, hear its sound, and watch an animated graph of the the sound it makes.

Wolfram had up an example file that included a vehicle driving by demonstrating the Doppler Effect. I took the free CDF player for a brief spin this morning, and liked what I saw. There’s also a plugin to allow CDF files to be read in your browser. You can open the file with the free player but will to buy the premium product in order to create the files. The model here is much like that of Adobe Acrobat and the PDF. With their free CDF player, Wolfram allows users to open their new file format, which has a range of applications, from reports to textbooks to infographics. Now comes the release of a new document format, the Computational Document Format or CDF. First came a mobile version of Wolfram Alpha, their popular web application, followed shortly by the Wolfram course assistant apps. While the company behind Mathematica has been a presence in high level mathematical circles for over a decade, Wolfram’s flurry of activity over the last year or so has been truly amazing.

Open cdf files in browser