A Peek into the Future of ExtendSim

With ExtendSim 10, under development now, we are updating and overhauling every aspect of the ExtendSim® application.

The development of this new version of the ExtendSim application uses industry standard IDEs (integrated development environments) for development on both Windows and Macintosh platforms. On Windows we're using Microsoft Visual Studio for our compilation and coding, and on the Macintosh we’re using Apple’s Xcode. Of course, as it has been for previous versions, the development language used for ExtendSim 10 is C++.

Another aspect of our development process that we are very excited about is we are using a cross-platform application framework call Qt. Using Qt gives us a huge advantage in that we can leverage all the existing features of the Qt framework and quickly take advantage of any new features the developers of Qt add to future versions. This means we can get new features out to you, our end users, more quickly.

A partial list of the new features planned for ExtendSim 10 that will come to you with the help of these new development tools are:

• Multiple Notebooks
• Docking tool palettes
• Tear-off tabs in dialogs and worksheets
• Multiple undo
• Improved zoom
• Anti-aliasing
• Scaled text – editable while scaled
• Object grouping
• Object free rotation
• Object transparency/translucency
• Polygon – add/remove points (alt click on a segment.)
• Improved dialog editor
• Code completion improvements
• Graphics objects on the dialog box
• Thermometer column tag
• Multiple animation objects moving at the same time
• Improved Help system
• Ability to run on all current Windows and Macintosh operating systems.
• And many more improvements.

Of course posting information like this always leads to the inevitable question, 'when will it be available?' At this point, our best response to that is it'll be available when it's done.