Google Colab does not support interactive matplotlib plots

[pheuer]

In an iPython notebook, you can enable interactive matplotlib plots simply by calling

%matplotlib notebook

However, on colab this seems to result in plots not being made at all. If you use

%matplotlib inline

Then the plots appear, but they are not interactive (e.g. you cannot rotate 3D plots).

@namurphy for the SULI 2023 summer school notebook on charge particle tracing, this is a significant downside to using colab.

[namurphy]

I've used mybinder.org in the past but it turns out that they recently lost their biggest provider of computing resources and thus have been having serious reliability problems. I added a binder launch link to the README, though. Other possibilities are cocalc.com and deepnote.com, though I don't know if it would be necessary to do a paid plan for something of this scale.

At the very least, we could have google colab as an option.

[pheuer]

I agree - what if I did the following:

1. Changed the default view on all the plots so that even if they aren't interactive, you can see the best view for the pre-programmed example.
2. Include instructions for both Binder and installing on Conda, and encourage students to try both.

edit: A paid version of one of these that actually does everything we need with ~200 license seats might be worth pricing out for potential inclusion in future grants. We could also use it to add links from the example notebooks in the docs to the interactive versions (instead of using binder)