Latest release candidate for Minsky 3.0 available
Dr Russell Standish has just released the latest release candidate (Number 11) for Minsky 3.0. This version is the culmination of the development cycle enabled by a £200,000 grant from Friends Provident Foundation, and is the first version of Minsky to use JavaScript as its front end rather than Tcl/Tk.
There are numerous functional improvements as well, perhaps the most notable of which is a "Browser" mode which keeps track of all the parameters, variables and stocks created in a model and lets you click on them to rapidly insert them where desired in a model. In previous versions you had to remember and retype them whenever they were needed; not any more.
I'm also working on a shorter manual than the one I released a few months back. It is stripped of the heavy economics content and will probably be 1/4 to 1/5th of the length.
At present the only beta available is the Windows version; Russ will release a Mac version when he gets back home from a short holiday (on which, rather like yours truly, he's spent a fair bit of time working).
Please download and try this version out. The more people who check it over, the more likely we are to find bugs. Don't be put off if you haven't used Minsky before: your testing will help because an inexperienced user is to some extent more likely to find bugs than an experienced one.
When this version is finalized--probably in the next week or two--it will mark the point at which Minsky has matured into a fully fledged system dynamics program. There are still a few bits of unfinished business (we don't yet support groups in which the contents are global rather than local, for instance), but it is now capable of standing next to programs with a far longer history--and a far higher price tag.