I don't think the details of his platform would be nearly as helpful to anyone attempting to reproduce this or possibly even diagnose this as a notebook containing n independent specific examples with directions to 1: reboot the machine, 2: boot Mathematica, 3: open this notebook, 4: evaluate a single specific cell in this notebook and 5: based on his repeated testing and for for his platform evaluating this cell will crash Mathematica about x% of the time. Since he has, more or less, reproducible crashes then this should be straightforward to do, it is the ones that can't be reproduced or even narrowed down to a specific example that are the harder ones. Otherwise this sounds like "I typed some stuff in, some stuff came out, some stuff is wrong, what?" that have been posted by some users in the past.

There are several solution paths for making third party packages available to people who don't have them. If the package is free, say from a WRI archive, why can't they just download and install it? The only problem here is that most packages are written in a messy form and the user has to jump through a few hoops to use them - the main problem being just to load it. They should be able to just unzip it into their $UserBaseDirectory/Applications folder and then use it. I discuss how to set up packages in this manner in the following reply:

http://community.wolfram.com/groups/-/m/t/393033?ppauth=WS2vzf9p

It's just the standard WRI paradigm and works great.

The Presentations application has a CustomTicks (and also free standing scales). You can draw graphics and then transmit them to other people with Mathematica or Export them in various formats. The recipient does not need to have Presentations. (You can't do that with everything in Presentations.) Here is an example.

 << Presentations`

f1[x_] := x^2;
f2[x_] := x^3;
testPlot1 =
 Draw2D[
  {Draw[f1[x], {x, 0, 10}, PlotPoints -> 7],
   Blue, Draw[f2[x]/10, {x, 0, 10}, PlotPoints -> 7]},
  AspectRatio -> 1/GoldenRatio,
  Frame -> True,
  FrameTicks -> {Automatic, Automatic, Automatic,
    CustomTicks[#/10 &, {0, 1000, 200, 4}, 
     CTNumberFunction -> (Style[#, FontColor -> Blue] &)]},
  PlotLabel -> Row[{x^2, " and ", Style[x^3, FontColor -> Blue]}],
  Background -> Legacy@Linen,
  BaseStyle -> {FontSize -> 12},
  ImageSize -> 300]

Now we use another Presentations feature to hide extensive code within a notebook.

HiddenNotebookData[myCustomPlot, "Test of plot without package", testPlot1]

This generates the following initialization cell:

myCustomPlot=<<Test of plot without package>>;

It is this last statement that you include in the notebook. It contains the hidden plot data between the skeletons, but the above statement does not because I just copied the plain text form of the statement. Then quitting Mathematica and restarting without Presentations:

myCustomPlot

The actual code in the cell is:

myCustomPlot = Graphics[{{{{}, {}, {
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RGBColor[0, 0, 1], {{{}, {}, {
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"]]}}}}, AspectRatio -> GoldenRatio^(-1), Frame -> True, 
   FrameTicks -> {Automatic, Automatic, Automatic, {{0, 
Style[0, FontColor -> RGBColor[0, 0, 1]], {0.0125, 0}, {
GrayLevel[0.], 
AbsoluteThickness[0.25]}}, {20, 
Style[200, FontColor -> RGBColor[0, 0, 1]], {0.0125, 0}, {
GrayLevel[0.], 
AbsoluteThickness[0.25]}}, {40, 
Style[400, FontColor -> RGBColor[0, 0, 1]], {0.0125, 0}, {
GrayLevel[0.], 
AbsoluteThickness[0.25]}}, {60, 
Style[600, FontColor -> RGBColor[0, 0, 1]], {0.0125, 0}, {
GrayLevel[0.], 
AbsoluteThickness[0.25]}}, {80, 
Style[800, FontColor -> RGBColor[0, 0, 1]], {0.0125, 0}, {
GrayLevel[0.], 
AbsoluteThickness[0.25]}}, {100, 
Style[1000, FontColor -> RGBColor[0, 0, 1]], {0.0125, 0}, {
GrayLevel[0.], 
AbsoluteThickness[0.25]}}, {5, "", {0.0075, 0}, {
GrayLevel[0.], 
AbsoluteThickness[0.125]}}, {10, "", {0.0075, 0}, {
GrayLevel[0.], 
AbsoluteThickness[0.125]}}, {15, "", {0.0075, 0}, {
GrayLevel[0.], 
AbsoluteThickness[0.125]}}, {25, "", {0.0075, 0}, {
GrayLevel[0.], 
AbsoluteThickness[0.125]}}, {30, "", {0.0075, 0}, {
GrayLevel[0.], 
AbsoluteThickness[0.125]}}, {35, "", {0.0075, 0}, {
GrayLevel[0.], 
AbsoluteThickness[0.125]}}, {45, "", {0.0075, 0}, {
GrayLevel[0.], 
AbsoluteThickness[0.125]}}, {50, "", {0.0075, 0}, {
GrayLevel[0.], 
AbsoluteThickness[0.125]}}, {55, "", {0.0075, 0}, {
GrayLevel[0.], 
AbsoluteThickness[0.125]}}, {65, "", {0.0075, 0}, {
GrayLevel[0.], 
AbsoluteThickness[0.125]}}, {70, "", {0.0075, 0}, {
GrayLevel[0.], 
AbsoluteThickness[0.125]}}, {75, "", {0.0075, 0}, {
GrayLevel[0.], 
AbsoluteThickness[0.125]}}, {85, "", {0.0075, 0}, {
GrayLevel[0.], 
AbsoluteThickness[0.125]}}, {90, "", {0.0075, 0}, {
GrayLevel[0.], 
AbsoluteThickness[0.125]}}, {95, "", {0.0075, 0}, {
GrayLevel[0.], 
AbsoluteThickness[0.125]}}}}, PlotLabel -> Row[{x^2, " and ", 
Style[x^3, FontColor -> RGBColor[0, 0, 1]]}], 
   Background -> RGBColor[0.980407, 0.941206, 0.902005], 
   BaseStyle -> {FontSize -> 12}, ImageSize -> 300, 
   PlotRange -> Automatic, PlotRangeClipping -> True];

It is also possible to provide free versions of packages that can be used to evaluate notebooks but are not very useful for writing notebooks. I provide such free versions of Presentations and ExtendUnits at my web site. They are condensed and do not contain any documentation or useful usage messages.

There is also an Applications folder in the free CDF player where readers could place such packages.

Again, I envision that the best form of applications would be like advanced textbooks but with much greater power and flexibility. They might make a great platform for joint research. Or for courseware. If they were priced in line with current textbooks or advanced technical books it would not be out of line for people who wanted to participate to buy and install them.

I am using Windows 7 Enterprise, Service Pack 1. I am looking forward to 10.0.2. I have heard that it will be released soon as well.

Of course -- including the crash report generated by OS X. I've only had 2 or 3, and they aren't strictly deterministic. I don't think that they are random either. I'm not good at reading the goat entrails from the crash logs. ;-)

I'm using Windows 8.1 and my experience is not too different from John McGee's.

John,

I am running M10 under the latest Mac OS X and have no such stability issues. As others have suggested, more details on your platform would help.

David Mackay

In the context of this question and this reply the following lines from 'Practical Foundations of Mathematics' by Paul Taylor (Cambridge Studies in Advanced Mathematics, 1999, p. 470) may be of interest: "On the other hand, the tite of technology will drive mathematicians into publishing their arguments in computer-encoded form. Theorems which provide nirvana will lose out to those that are programs and do calculations for their users on demand. A new philosophical and semantic basis is needed to save mathematics from being reduced again to programming." Shortly after reading this I started to contribute to the Wolfram Demonstrations project and felt to be not too far away from what Taylor is speaking about.

David, I read your wish and while I was redoing my keyboard shortcut code I added a "Command Option M" keyboard shortcut ("Cmd Alt M" on Windows, "Mod1 Mod2 M" on Linux) here. It is a bit slow (on MacOSX, faster on Windows), but it works. I am sure the good folks at Wolfram will implement something like this for some future release. It is not that hard to do.