Announcing the release of version 0.5.0 This email is to announce the availability of Modelica by Example v0.5.0 (actually, v0.5.3 because we've made a few minor changes since we first published v0.5.0).



It has been quite a while since I've had a chance to work on the book and, frankly, it has been too long and too neglected. So this fall I carved out some time to really focus not just on improving the book, but in charting a course to an eventual print release. The key to this was organizing all the feedback I've gotten so far and putting together some milestones so that I have a clear roadmap of what needs to be done in order to get to a print release. Furthermore, I'll do better in the future about making steady progress against all those milestones.



The big news is the release of version 0.5.x of the book. Lots of work went into organizing this release. For example, I spent quite a bit of time ironing out issues with a continuous integration and continuous deployment process for the book. This was largely inspired by the work of Dongping Xie and Dietmar Winkler. This means that I can focus on content editing and the site will get automatically updated. These improvements are a huge step forward for me personally because it means that there is now a highly repeatable and automated process to replace lots of tedious manual steps that used to frequently break (which created a lot of overhead in working on the book).



One interesting "side effect" of the CI/CD system is that the very latest of the "master" branch of the book is continuously deployed to a preview site. So you can always see the latest version there, although I want to emphasize that the purpose of that site is mostly to help me and reviewers preview changes before they are officially published. But you might occasionally glimpse some fun improvements there from time to time before they are officially released.



Another big change in the book is the look and feel. I'm still using Sphinx as my publishing platform, but I've completely changed the way that the HTML for the free online version is generated. Most of you probably won't notice a big difference for most pages of the book, but the landing page and index have been heavily refactored. For those propellor heads out there who are curious, the new site is rendered using react-static and I wrote an article on Medium about my experience leveraging that.



Apart from various fixes and improvements to the text, there is now support for inline search. You'll notice on each page a "search" dialog at the top of the page. Although you may have noticed a search dialog in the previous version this one has the huge advantage that it actually does something. It isn't complete or perfect. I have some ideas for improving it further. But it is definitely a good start.



But the changes just keep coming. You may recall that the previous HTML version of the book supported interactive figures. I wanted to leverage the browser platform as much as possible and the previous releases supported running simulations in the browser by executing client-side Javascript. While I think this is really cool and that technologies like WebAssembly (wasm for short) will make this a completely viable approach in the future, I found this approach difficult to support currently. As a result, I completely refactored the way these interactive examples were done. They are still interactive, but they leverage a server-based approach now. The nice thing is that simulation times are much faster AND this approach supports pretty much any mobile device (unlike the client-side approach which could overtax some mobile devices).



For those who have purchased electronic versions of the book in the past, you should be getting an email like this later today that provides links to the very latest builds of the book. If you bought the book but don't get that email, let me know. If you didn't buy the electronic versions but would like to, there is easy link on the landing page. Just look for the "Purchase eBook" option.



There were lots of changes (annotation folding, improved eBook rendering, proper image scaling, pre-rendering of equations, etc.) that went into this edition and many more planned. I hope you find all of this helpful and thanks for your interest and support.



Michael Tiller Check It Out!