I'm just curious - and I don't work for Maplesoft :) - but what do people here actually use Maple for ? What sorts of problems are you tackling, and what commands/packages do you typically use ? I'm also interested to hear about how people use Maple in teaching (for those that do). Myself I use Maple for research in computer algebra - mostly topics related to polynomial systems. For example, I may be trying to find algorithms to compute in new domains. I like Maple because it is very easy to program mathematical algorithms. It is not quite so easy to get them to run fast, but that gives me something to work on :) I mostly use my own software (PolynomialIdeals + recent code), but I also use the Groebner package and now the RegularChains package (new in Maple 10). I make a point of trying all the other packages every once in a while, since you never know when something is going to be useful. I use the plot commands a lot as well.

I think Maple should have compression in the .mw format. I don't care if it breaks backwards compatibility, it should be an option. Later you can make it the default. I recently looked at this post, which links to an 11MB worksheet. Using "zip" compressed it down to 60KB. This is beyond bad - it's obscene! Note that this would also fix the problem of broken mail servers corrupting .mw attachments. Just swipe some FreeBSD code and put this feature in. Please!

I've posted a worksheet and some code for simplification with side relations. What makes this code interesting is that it properly handles rational expressions, using an algorithm is from my M.Sc. thesis. You can download the code from the Maple Application Center here, or from my personal webpage here. The code requires Maple 10.

The Maple User Group mailing list was once the main forum for asking questions and discussing Maple. Eventually the comp.soft-sys.math.maple newsgroup was proposed and the MUG list faded away. Some answers to specific questions are archived here, and all messages from 1998-2003 are available as digests.

Robert Israel's homepage contains a number of useful Maple resources, including the Maple Advisor Database.