Thursday, January 30, 2014

SpeedCrunch 0.11 released

It's not dead yet. It's now been over four years since the release of 0.11 alpha and it couldn't unfortunately have been any different. But today I'm finally able to offer you the minimum feature set and quality that you've been waiting for.

Oh-Eleven brings you syntax highlighting on the result display, predefined color schemes, instant function usage help, digit grouping (thanks, Tey), new languages, a slightly redesigned formula book with new sections, lots of visual perks, and a new icon (by yours truly, who decided to take an adventure in vector graphics). You can now include comments in the expression - everything after a question mark (?) will be ignored and highlighted differently. Finally, bot comma and dot are now accepted as radix characters. Check the complete closed list of enhancements and defects.

Now for some bad news for some of you: the virtual keypad is gone. The reason for this is that it goes against the SpeedCrunch philosophy and main goal - to be a keyboard-oriented, fast to use scientific calculator. The old keypad was both ugly and not very functional. I'll consider re-adding a keypad in the future IFF a significant user base asks for it and a good and scalable design is found. I see this feature in the same category and usefulness as RPN support.

I'm already thinking about 0.12 (or 1.0) and the features that should have priority. One of them is the long awaited ability to define user functions. Thanks to Tey, we're getting there and it will certainly be available in the next version. But for now, I hope you'll enjoy and find this release useful. Grab your Windows or OS X package from the usual place, which has just been heavily revamped. Linux users will have to wait for their distribution to update their included version.

Would like to help the project? You can translate it, file a feature request or bug you found, or contribute with source code.