YT development team:

We’re happy to announce a new web-based GUI for yt called Reason (version five!).  It incorporates the full functionality of yt as well as several additional features that should make using YT much more efficient and interactive.  In particular, new users and users working on remote machines (e.g. kraken, ranger, pleaides, etc.) should find this new GUI very useful as it allows one to interactively manipulate and visualize non-local data.

Reason operates by creating a portable webserver on demand, which loads a javascript page bridging to the yt/python interpreter.  This page provides an interpreter interface, with identical yt functionality, where created images/plots are posted to the web interface.  We’re still experimenting with how to provide access to this, but it includes the ability to transfer and directly display images, display widgets for interactive data exploration, and save and load scripts between runs.

To use Reason, you will need to have the ext-js and ext-slate-theme packages, now included with the current install script.  You can also download these manually.  Once installed, start it by simply running:

$ yt serve

If you are running locally and supply the -o option (yt serve -o), it will open up a web browser automatically.  There is also a help button in the lower left of Reason with basic functionality explained.  Keep in mind that this is a BETA sequence (projection doesn’t work yet), but please check it out, play around with it, and report any bugs or desired features missing from it.  

--Cameron Hummels, Jeff Oishi, Britton Smith & Matt Turk