Friday, September 25, 2020

New Tutorials

Along with the new release of MOMDYN onto the App Store and Play Store, I have created two new tutorials, for a simple pendulum, and a mass-spring-damper. These will be permanent pages (not blog posts), and I'm going to incorporate them and their corresponding Youtube videos directly into the app. Check out the videos below, and go download the app! (or join the beta, its free, just send me an email).




Wednesday, September 16, 2020

Version 1.0 ... Live in the App Store!

Guess what? As of today, the 16th of September, 2020, MOMDYN is available for the public on the iOS App Store! Check out that screenshot below, first (and only) result for multibody dynamics, how's that for fulfilling a life goal? 



I'm expecting to go live on the Play store in the next few days as well, then I'll have two buttons like a proper app. You'll see I'm charging $4.99, why? Because I can. The beta will stay free though, a willing tester will always be worth more to me than 5 bucks. If you're interested in joining the beta test, send me an email.

This is a culmination of almost a year of work for me, first while on sabbatical, and more recently in the early morning and late at night when I'm not working my regular job. I'm pretty excited to give it a run out in the wild west of mobile apps. Wish me luck!

Friday, September 4, 2020

What's new in version 0.10?

 Version 0.10 is up on Test Flight for iOS beta testers, and the Android version will be following shortly. This will be the *last* beta version before I release to the public on the App stores! This version contains all the basic features that I want for MOMDYN, and while I expect to keep on improving, I'm excited to finally release it into the wild. A little clip of the most recent version in action below. 



What you'll see in this latest version:

  • Rigid Body Cylinder
  • Rigid Body Cone
  • Tabbed interface update
The cylinder and cone are very similar to the existing Rigid Body Box interface, replacing the two width and height arguments with a single radius argument. I had to do a bit of work to figure out how to make a nice wireframe graphic for these, which you can see some of at this Google Colaboratory notebook. A screenshot of that notebook is below, I used IPywidgets and the interact function to create the slider bars which rotate the cylinder and cone in the plot (note, you have to visit the link to use the interactions).


The new tabbed interface is purely aesthetic, I think putting them at the bottom better aligns with the visual qualities of a lot of modern iOS and Android apps. Also a few subtle changes to color themes, and made the report tabs all fit on a single line.

As I near release, I'll make note that I'm still looking for testers. I'll be doing this myself for the next couple of weeks, tapping my way through all the menus I can think of and seeing what breaks. Would like to have a few more folks to cover my blind spots. Besides that, I'm interested in what the users really want for future releases. I have my own ideas (more bodies and joints, 3-D diagram, ...), but the product really should be community driven. If you're interested, send me an email at mobilemultibodydynamics@gmail.com, and I'll add you to the list, its free, all I ask is you send me good useful feedback.