Jupyter: notebooks for education and collaboration

Regarding your third item: If you use "%matplotlib notebook" instead of "%matplotlib inline" your embedded plots will be fully interactive--you can resize, zoom, etc.--until you close the figure either programmatically or via the "stop interaction" button in the upper right-hand corner. Alternatively, you can use "%matplotlib qt" (for example, assuming you have PyQt5 installed) to generate each plot in its own independent window, outside the browser. This provides more speed and flexibility while developing the notebook, but saving the plots as embedded in the notebook or in an export requires restarting the kernel and re-running with "notebook" or "inline" in place of "qt" in that initial "magic" directive.