After a request, there’s a cool new feature coming soon in DANSE: you can pause the simulation, change an entry in a routeing table, or a timer in the MAC protocol, or anything else the protocol designer has provided the facility for, and then carry on. It’s in the development version now, it’ll be in the release version as soon as it gets a bit more testing, As far as I know, DANSE is the only simulator that allows you to do this.
In other news – I’ve been looking at other development frameworks for writing small animations and simulations for the book. Silverlight, much as I like it, isn’t as widely supported as some other frameworks, and I’ve been looking to see what can be done in JavaScript, Java Applets, Flash, and so on. After a weekend of frantic learning and experimenting, I’m back at Silverlight again. Java Applets and Flash would work on a wider range of hardware, but still not everything (the most notable example being the iPad). So why learn a whole new technology which isn’t universally supported either?
I’ll stick to Silverlight for now. When the world gets itself sorted out and agrees on a way to run powerful client-side apps on everything (which I still hope someday it might), I’ll start converting. In the meantime, anyone who wants to read the book with all the examples and demonstrations on a tablet will just have to get an Android device. (Not that I’ve tested Moonlight… I can’t afford a Xoom… but if I get the chance to test things out, I will.)