SpeedCrunch

SpeedCrunch 0.11-alpha released

2009-11-05T01:20:00.003+01:00

It's long long due, but I finally got a small amount of available time to release this test version. If the term alpha does not ring a bell for you, please be aware that it might contain numerous bugs.

Although it should function quite well for the majority of users, the goal of this release is precisely to give people a new version to play with and report back the issues encountered during usage.

You can give us feedback through our mailing list, but if you are sure about the existence of a bug, please fill it on our bug tracker.

I apologize for the lack of a proper and up-to-date change log, but you can check most of the changes here. And these are the issues still to solve and targeted at final 0.11.

For the many people who requested business-oriented built-in functions, sorry for not having worked on it yet. I haven't forgotten about it though. Will try to include them for the final 0.11, but can't promise. Also, there are some old requests still not implemented in this version, so if your particular wish matches that case, I'm sorry for that.

Like usually, contributors of any kind are more than welcome to help this project (developers, translators, testers, etc). Please feel free to participate in our mailing list or contact me directly.

Special thanks to Alessandro, Andreas, Ariya and Wolf, who help me in keeping this project alive despite the slow progress in the past year.

Only the links are missing:

Installer for Microsoft Windows

Portable Edition for Microsoft Windows

Apple Mac OS X Universal application

Source code tarball

I hope that the new features, user interface tuning and new translations please you, as well as the bugs fixed. If not, please let us know your thoughts.

Happy crunching!

Call for a new icon

2009-09-19T02:43:00.004+02:00

After almost a year without blogging, I decided to shake the community a bit, while we try to find the time to finish the next release. For ages, we've been trying to find a new icon for the application. Very recently, two of our users sent their proposals, so I though why not just announce a sort of contest (with no prize for the winner besides getting all the fame and honor of being the SpeedCrunch's icon author :)

That said, all icons will be considered if they're available in SVG format, and come with a license that allows us to use it freely (including modifying it).

Sending us your icon is very simple, you just need to upload it here. You're free to upload as many as you want.

The deadline is October 15. The winner will be announced shortly after that. The decision will be taken by the core developers, and we can of course consider the users' opinions, expressed on the mailing list or here.

Happy design, and I hope we can deliver the new SpeedCrunch to you soon.

UPDATE: due to no time at all to dedicate to the project ATM, the icon contest deadline will be prolonged for undetermined time. The idea is still to have a new icon for the new release though.

Google Statistics On Popularity and Relevance

2008-10-22T16:21:00.004+02:00

Interesting stuff... I've played around with Google Code and got the following results when searchings for labels among all hosted projects:

1st for: calculator, desktop, OSX, Qt, Qt4, and cross-platform

2nd for utility

3rd for Linux and Windows

4th for CPlusPlus

Thank you, SVN. Hello, Git.

2008-10-20T11:54:00.003+02:00

From today on, SpeedCrunch is no more using SVN at Google Code as its version control system. Instead, it is now hosted at Gitorious, which uses Git. There are dozens of reasons for this move, but I won't mention them here. Googling on why Git is a better choice than SVN returns thousands of results.

EDIT: I've added a page to our wiki with instructions on how to get the latest development code. It is now also the page that you get when you try to access the Source tab in our Google Code site. Note that all the other services (issue tracker, wiki, download hosting, etc) from Google Code are still our official sites, only the code repository has changed to Gitorious.

SpeedCrunch Success as a Portable App

2008-10-20T11:41:00.003+02:00

SpeedCrunch has a Windows Portable Edition (as in "carry-with-you" or "no-installation-needed") since version 0.10. The lastest release, 0.10.1 (May 24), has a Portable Edition download count of almost 11000 as I write this (source).

But since August 22, our fellow folks at PortableApps.com have incorporated SpeedCrunch in their distribution (page). This is absolute good business for us, since the download count is at this moment a bit above 47000 (source).

This is quite impressive and gives SpeedCrunch yet another boost, since it basically doubles our Windows (installable and portable together) download rates for 0.10.1. A big thank you to portableapps.com!

Conspiracy Theory

2008-09-22T11:51:00.006+02:00

I just found this Windows 7 preview video showing a new calculator. It really reminds me of SpeedCrunch in the last seconds. Am I the only one? Anyway, can it run everywhere? :)

Edit1: I've updated the link, since the previous video was removed.
Edit2: Link gone again. Here are new ones (all different videos): 1 2 3.

Essential Motivation in Free Software

2008-08-02T01:07:00.003+02:00

Being really tired to code anything on a Friday evening while the TV tries to force me to watch Dick Tracy in vain, I decided to do a web search on reviews about SpeedCrunch.

I was surprised with the amount of recent articles about 0.10.1, complete with screenshots and non-copied-and-pasted text. I quickly found some 20 posts, and that was just looking for pages in English, Portuguese and Spanish. Articles in Spanish and Brazilian Portuguese are quite common for some time (thank you everybody responsible for that!), but today I got really touched when I found a very nice page with a review from someone from Portugal for the first time. The feeling is even bigger when one lives outside the home country.

I haven't found a review saying SpeedCrunch essentially sucks so far, and the opinions are actually VERY favorable. On top of that, readers often comment on those pages thanking for the divulgation of such great alternative free software. The voting score is also generally the highest possible.

So in addition to blogs, some of the websites were software aggregators that actually host the application files (they don't just link to our download page). That was when I found out by summing the few that I visited, that I could add at least 10 000 downloads to our counter (which is currently around 22 000, just for both Windows options). Well, considering all the websites that I didn't visit, and that every download eventually results, in average, in the sharing with the whole family / friends / office mates / class mates / you-name-it-group-of-people, I truly believe that the current amount of users (again, just for the Windows versions) can be, at the very least, 100 000.

Since SpeedCrunch is also available on almost all the most popular Linux distributions, and especially considering that it is shipped as the default desktop calculator in Kubuntu, the total number of users is probably extremely interesting for a project that started only as a toy and a proof of concept, and has always been a 1-2 active men project (active as in when the rare spare time after the real job and private life allows). The recent recovered support for the OSX platform also contributed for the increase of total official downloads, which surprised me a lot, to be honest.

Finally, it's also very gratifying to read Wikipedia pages mentioning our beloved pet project, on articles like division by zero and arbitrary-precision arithmetic. All of these factors are quite important in order to keep the motivation levels high and refuse to stop improving the project because nobody really uses it or really cares.

It's fairly easy to start a free software project, but maintaining it is a hell of a trip. On activity peak times, you can't just stop coding until you reach a certain satisfactory level of features and stability. After that period, you run out of ideas and free time. So people suddenly come to you and complain about bugs or features that MUST be there, otherwise the product is useless and the author a jerk. This can easily lead to the extinction of projects, which is probably the most common destiny of them all anyway.

Developers must then learn how to ignore destructive comments and incentivate constructive ones, instead of starting flame wars, stalling the project and wasting precious time. Feature suggestion and bug reporting are two essential and determinant factors that only the users can do, and will definitely contribute for the survival of a project. I imagine that if what has been happening with the KDE Plasma project lately happened with a "small", innocent and unpretentious SpeedCrunch, the application would probably have frozen in time. All because ingratitude and destructive positions send real contributers' motivation to the void.

So thank you for being there and keeping this project alive and kickin' :)

SpeedCrunch 0.10.1 released

2008-06-03T00:15:00.003+02:00

It took much longer than it should and than we all wished, but finally here it is. SpeedCrunch 0.10.1 is a maintenance release that aims to fix a couple of annoying bugs present in 0.10, as well as introduce new translations and polish things even more.

So finally the virtual keypad "=" button works again, the previous and next math book navigation buttons have been fixed for the Hebrew version (for those who don't know, the left arrow means "forward" instead of "back" in right-to-left written languages), and the unmask function does not crash anymore.

Since I'm a language and translation lover, I'm very glad to announce the availability of Simplified Chinese, Basque and Catalan translations. Best thing since the Hebrew translation :)

For the geeks, a detailed changelog is available, as well as the list of closed issues in our task tracker.

I kept the cherry for the end: a big thank you to Alessandro Portale for providing the first Apple Mac OS X universal package since version 0.7, and Christian Ehrlicher for providing faster and smaller Microsoft Windows packages.

Go get it! (and before you ask, the new screenshots were created by Ariya's new pet project)

Crunching on the Mac

2008-05-17T13:32:00.008+02:00

A few weeks ago, Helder showed me SpeedCrunch in all its splendor. I was immediately convinced that this has to be the open source cross platform desktop calculator. But wait... what's that!? No up-to-date OSX package? Just having learned about SpeedCrunch, I immediately felt bad for all the OSX users out there being excluded from all the new features.

Having basic OSX experience, I decided to jump on the boat and create fresh OSX packages: Universal binary, compact and using the latest Qt. SpeedCrunch 0.10.1 will already come with a new OSX package.

You are welcome to test the preview version. Please let me know if something went wrong. I am for example not 100% sure if it runs on OSX 10.3.9.

If you like to build an OSX package yourself, just follow the instructions.

SpeedCrunch 0.10 Released!

2008-04-01T22:38:00.008+02:00

After about 4 months of very strong dedication (and I mean it), a new version is out there. You can get it as usual from the project website download page. NOTE: now there is also a portable edition available in addition to the normal installer, please read the instructions on the page. There, you can also read the major changes in this version (box on the right). If you're really interested, you can always read the changelog or, why not, the list of all the bug fixes and enhancements registered in the issue tracker.

My personal very favorite new features are:

the ability to calculate, inside an immediate tooltip, the result of the selected text (in addition to the calculate-as-you-type feature that SpeedCrunch introduced a long time ago)

the possibility to save and restore sessions, keeping your variables between them. It also makes it possible for you to send your calculations to someone. In addition, it is also possible to run a batch calculation from a file, as well as the text export that was broken in the previous version

the ability to change the language of the application on-the-fly, with no need to restart, as well as a close to complete support for right-to-left written languages (Hebrew, for now, but I'd love to be contacted by an arabic or whatever translator)

automatic generation of high contrast colors to be used on the syntax highlighting of the expression being entered, adapting automatically to the system background and foreground colors, thus removing the need for a human (tedious) reconfiguration of the colors

a new dock window serving as a browsable mathematics manual, with geometry figures, quadratic equation, etc, allowing the immediate insertion of the formulas displayed in the book pages into the expression editor

reorganized menus and virtual keypad

I need to mention this. There's a sort of an "easter egg" in SpeedCrunch that just a few people seem to know about. If you press Ctrl+Space, you'll get a popup with all the constant categories. If you press Enter, Return or Right Arrow on one of them, a new view will slide in the popup - the list of constants belonging to the category you chose. Pretty handy for those who use the calculator through the keyboard and need frequent and fast access to the constants they need.

I'd like to say a huge thank you to Wolf Lammen for his active development, especially on the math engine and parser; Petri Damstén for his original idea of the math book and prototype implementation; Marco Wegner for his testings, tips and work related on our translation tools; Yonathan Avraham for his help on the RTL support; Johan Thelin for being always available to help me with my deep questions about Qt and packaging the application on Windows; Ariya Hidayat, the original author, for his important contributions on the last days and what not (and we both started working for Trolltech today, life's funny sometimes, hurray!).

I hope you enjoy the new release, it should be the most complete and polished release ever.
For the Linux users, a dynamically linked portable edition will be shipped soon as well (that shall work on any Linux distribution with Qt 4.2 or higher version), and requiring no installation, just like the new Windows Portable Edition. That's it for now!

Translators needed again

2008-03-23T01:25:00.002+01:00

If SpeedCrunch is not yet available in your native language and you are interesting in having it for the upcoming release, please contact me. Even if SpeedCrunch 0.9 already features your language, please do it the same, because some translations will most probably and unfortunately not be maintained for 0.10.

Some more mentions

2008-03-22T02:38:00.002+01:00

A quick googling allowed me to find some more reviews about SpeedCrunch on:

Lightweight Linux Review
Go2Linux
nixCraft

SOTD

2008-03-12T01:22:00.004+01:00

SpeedCrunch trunk running on KDE 4. The new (optional, as almost everything else in the application) status bar and the new automatically generated syntax hilighting colors are shown. Not shown is the new feature that allows the user to select a part of the expression being inserted and get its result immediately in a tooltip (just like calc-as-you-type). The math book also got a new style sheet. I hope that in the future we can adapt it automatically to the system colors as well (the only tricky part is to make images adaptive).

Generating syntax highlighting colors based on system colors

2008-02-21T22:37:00.020+01:00

For quite some time it came to my mind that the colors used for syntax highlighting should be automatically generated by the application, removing the need of forcing the user to manually edit each and every color everytime a new color scheme is chosen for the whole system. In the SpeedCrunch case, there's at least the need of choosing 3 colors for the expression editor syntax highlighting: variables, functions and numerals.

The problem is when the text box background or the text color is not the expected (generally white and black, respectively). So I started playing with some code in order to try to reach an easy and acceptable enough algorithm that could make SpeedCrunch adapt to any text and background color combinations (or at least the most common and wise ones). Certainly, predefined color sets (that also include and overwrite the system background and text colors) shall always be provided, in order to ensure that nobody needs to switch off syntax highlighting.

Let's look at the examples. The surrounding color represents the system base color, used for text input boxes, for instance. The first colored square represents the system text color. The remaining squares are the generated colors for highlighting. If you see no surrounding color, that's because it's white.

KDE / Windows * / MacOs X / BeOS

Solaris

CDE

Digital CDE

Black on light grey

Blue on almost black

Blue on black

Blue on dark blue

Green on black

White on black

White on dark blue

White on light grey

Yellow on blue

All the three squares to the right of each image where generated from the first one from the left and the background color. It seems to me that even in "dummy" color sets like in the last example, the algorithm performs really well. I guess I'll introduce this in SpeedCrunch for 0.10.

Edit: this feature is now in SpeedCrunch's trunk. 0.10 will come with it.

0.10 Preview

2008-02-19T15:35:00.008+01:00

Next release won't take long to hit the streets and is reaching a stable point. Here's a preview screenshot tour:

Radio groups for angle unit and number base selection are gone now, in order to release some screen space. The very same options are available in a quickly reachable menu inside Settings and are also available through even faster keyboard shortcuts. Note that the previously available Clear and Evaluate buttons are also gone. Their actions are now available in the optional virtual keypad and through faster keyboard shortcuts as well.

For those who really like to preserve space, it's even possible to hide the menu bar. To show it again, a keyboard shortcut is available to perform the action (a tool tip is shown to warn the user about this).
Let's now look at a full demonstration of all the optionally available visual elements.

You can see all the dock windows that were already available (nested and tabbed on the left and right side), a reworked virtual keypad and a new toy to play with: a mathematics book (floating on the right). One can browse it like a website and insert the formulas directly into the expression editor. If the required variables are already defined, the result will be calculated and presented.

And of course you can hide the virtual keypad again in order to get more space available for the docks. In the example, we can see a page for the quadratic equation. Currently there are additional pages for various 2D and 3D objects. If you want to contribute with more pages to enrich our book, just contact us. Physics and other areas are also welcome, not only plain mathematics. The pages are trivial to design (you can easily do it with the lamest text editor). We'll help you out with your first one. I must say they are also translatable (I always try to make sure everything is translatable :) So the book will be available in other languages, just like the rest of the application.

In 0.10 it will also be possible to run SpeedCrunch in full screen mode (additionally to the stay-always-on-top mode). The mathematical core was also very much reworked and is better than ever. There are plans to introduce rational and complex numbers to the application. Not sure if for 0.11 or later, since 0.11's main focus will be a complete port for KDE4. Also still possible to be ready for 0.10 is the "portable" (as in take it with you) build. So then you just need to copy a directory to your flash drive and run your favorite calculator anywhere :)

SpeedCrunch on IRC

2008-01-21T01:01:00.000+01:00

I decided to touch an IRC client after some 6 years. It reminded me my very first experiences with Internet while I was a student at the university. I was used to text clients though, of course. It was kinda cool, actually, with lots of colors on the screen :)
So suddenly I thought to myself "why not, let's create a SpeedCrunch channel".
That's it. Please feel free to come by and discuss whatever about the project. Request some features, report some errors, say that we suck, volunteer for something, you name it. Remember, channel #speedcrunch @ irc.freenode.net.

SpeedCrunch with Oxygen style

2008-01-14T23:23:00.000+01:00

Work is continuing to bring SpeedCrunch closer to become a real KDE 4 application. In the mean time, with the recent launch of KDE 4.0 that sports a new widget style, Oxygen, it's also worth to mention that SpeedCrunch already integrates nicely (with respect to appearance) and does not feel out of place, as evidenced from the following click-to-enlarge screenshot:

SpeedCrunch runs on Maemo-based tablets

2007-12-22T22:41:00.000+01:00

Jean-Luc Biord announced the availability of Qt4 for Maemo tablets. Maemo provides an open source development platform for Nokia Internet Tablets and other Linux-based devices. Since Qt4 now runs on it, applications based on our beloved popular framework can now be compiled to work on nice handheld devices:
A first application is already ported, it's SpeedCrunch a fast, high precision and powerful desktop calculator...

Math Book

2007-12-14T10:19:00.000+01:00

Since I do not do math every day I usually have check equations from some math book/net. SpeedCrunch has several dock widgets and I thought that some kind of math book widget would be nice. After mockup got positive feedback I wrote something to start with. Since writing simple browser with QTextBrowser is an easy job, that did not take long. When talking to Helder Correia he noted that this could be a more general book widget that could also show help etc. I think the result look promising especially considering how little time it took to make it :-)

(This post can also be found from my blog)

Feature plan for 0.10

2007-12-12T01:26:00.000+01:00

Finally I took some time to write down all the features I'm aiming for the next release. My personal favorite news are the KDE4 look and feel (parallel with a plain and old good Qt4), a new book dock widget to navigate through a user manual and e.g. math figures with (click-to-insert) formulas. Read all the planned (and already implemented) changes. If time and luck allows, the list can even increase, but I prefer to be pessimistic :)

SpeedCrunch keeps being mentioned

2007-12-09T21:15:00.000+01:00

Ariya pointed me again to two pages where SpeedCrunch is a player.

According to the article Top 10 Kubuntu Applications Part 1, SpeedCrunch also fills the gap where CALC.EXE fails to put processing power to work. SpeedCrunch’s view is more informative and input options are more diverse. It provides a running history of the calculations and provides user defined variables.
Edit: A new and dedicated review has been added by the same author.

On yet another article in Spanish, SpeedCrunch: Scientific calculator for PC, you even get a very cute screenshot. Sorry non-latin language folks, but I'm not going to post the translation of the article as I did last time (I translated the title, so no complaining :).

SpeedCrunch 0.9 Released

2007-11-18T12:40:00.000+01:00

Download it and read the changes at the usual place. The application is now available in 17 languages and a Windows installer is provided as always.
Thank you so much to all the translators, bug reporters, packagers, contributors and developers (in particular Wolf Lammen for this release).

New version approaching, translators needed

2007-11-04T16:10:00.000+01:00

Some months after 0.8, a new release is scheduled for November 18. About half of the improvements and fixes that were planned will have to be shifted to another release. Lately, the developers' professional and private lives have been taking all of the former usual spare time because of its higher priorities. Nevertheless, this version brings some cool enhancements.
Of those, I'd like to mention the absolutely extraordinary work of the new developer Wolf Lammen, who has integrated a new, faster, more accurate and stable math core into SpeedCrunch. The usual new functions and a stay always-on-top window feature are also some of the news.
So it is now time for the call for translators. The current version is available in 16 languages. For this release, I'd like to extend this number. So if you want to contribute to this project with a new or updated translation, you're very welcome to do so. Please drop a comment on this article or on our Google Groups forum. You just need to know how to use Trolltech's Qt Linguist 4.
Here's the up-to-date list of languages already being taken care of by someone:
de | es_AR | fi | fr | he | id | it | nl | pt | pt_BR | ru | sv

A nice review

2007-07-29T19:31:00.000+02:00

Ariya found this interesting review (in Spanish). I've translated it to English so most of you can understand it (may not be a perfect translation though, since I'm native portuguese and not spanish):

"Although any operating system comes with a calculator, its characteristics go no further beyond common calculations. If we need more precise results or execute calculations with certain complexity, we shall consider SpeedCrunch as a magnificent tool. It's a calculator program with some very interesting features like scrolling display, up to 50 decimal digits precision, unlimited variable storage, intelligent automatic completion or additional math functions. Using it is very pleasant since we can customize the look, and we can deal with big expressions with no problem because of the syntax highlighting and parenthesis matching. It's an option to consider when traditional solutions are not enough and we don't want to use other GNU/Linux complex calculation tools."

SpeedCrunch 0.9 release plan

2007-07-26T13:39:00.000+02:00

First of all, I'd like to say that a maintenance 0.8.1 release might be considered if some critical bugs are found meanwhile. And now...0.9.

We've already got a lot of improvements and bug fixes in mind, so let's define the goals and deadlines for the next major 0.9 release codenamed Nona (spelled Noh-na and meaning ninth in Portuguese :)

I learned a lot from 0.8's process, since it was my very first FOSS release. Many mistakes were made and I hope to fix them for Nona. Also, SpeedCrunch has lately won a great number of contributors (enhancement proposals, testing, bug fixing, translations). And so I had a lot of trouble coordinating everybody, accomplishing deadlines and managing bug reports and patches.

For the upcoming release, I'd love to increase the number of active contributors. Maybe Johan can come back to active development now that he's finished his book on Qt 4. Maybe Wolf can help in other fields other than his very promising new math engine. Maybe someone else new can come and help in order to achieve an even bigger boost. And of course I guess we can always count on our old daddy (guess who) to help us from time to time when he's resting from KOffice and his PhD :)

So here's the plan, based on my recent experience. And it's really meant to be respected, else I'll end up e.g. fixing translations by hand over and over til the very last moment before the release, just like it happened this time. Goals and achievement dates are:

SpeedCrunch 0.8 released

2007-07-26T03:46:00.000+02:00

Download
Changelog
Registered fixed defects and implemented enhancements

Thank you to all contributors, testers and translators.

NOTE: SpeedCrunch is now available in 16 languages :)

Would anyone like to contribute?

2007-07-11T00:34:00.000+02:00

I'm looking for translators. Have you ever wanted to contribute to FOSS and never knew how or never had the chance? You're welcome to help translating SpeedCrunch (both the application and the website) to your native language. Please drop a comment or join the mailing-list if you're up to it.

Achieved translations for this release:

Argentinian Spanish by Lucas Sallovitz
Brazilian Portuguese by Fábio Margarido
Czech by Blond'ák
Dutch by Maarten Fonville
Finnish by J-P Nurmi
French by Grégory Treiber
German by Marco Wegner
Hebrew by Jonathan Avraham
Italian by Alessio Sclocco
Norwegian by Thomas Finneid
Portuguese by Helder Correia
Romanian by Eugeniu Plamadeala
Russian by Irek Khasyanov
Spanish by F Chris Carrera
Swedish by Johan Thelin

Thank you so much to all mentioned above.

0.8-alpha release

2007-07-01T18:39:00.000+02:00

The first test release of the upcoming SpeedCrunch 0.8 has just been made available. Many bug fixes, new functions and operators, as well as tons of constants and graphical improvements are available. Check all the changes we made since the last stable release.

Here you can get the source archive. For this alpha release, a Windows installer will be provided very soon, and hopefully a MacOS X version too.

We hope you can help us finding all the possible remaining bugs and discovering new ones in order to provide a very stable 0.8 final release. Thank you in advance.

Again, to submit a bug report or a feature request, refer to Ariya's previous post on that topic.

Update: Marco Wegner has kindly provided an ebuild for Gentoo.

Update: New Microsoft Windows installer available.

Greatest Common Divisor

2007-06-24T02:39:00.001+02:00

Although quite simple, this is one of my favourite new features for 0.8. One will now be able to calculate the greatest common divisor of an unlimited amount of numbers. This way, we can now write

gcd( 675; 633312; -57618; 243 )
27

This is particularly useful if you are adding fractions by hand and they all have different denominators, but has certainly a whole bunch of other applications.

Probability theory

2007-06-24T02:17:00.000+02:00

After combinatorics, SpeedCrunch has just been enhanced with its first probability support. This was indeed my favourite mathematics subject when I was a student, so I decided to implement some discrete distributions. So for now we've got three available: Binomial, Hypergeometric and Poisson.

Available for each distribution are functions for probability mass, cumulative distribution, mean and variance. If you usually need some others or find them useful even if you don't use them, please tell us.

I've got many more further plans on these topics for the next SpeedCrunch releases, but I'll leave it like this for 0.8. There are still some open higher priority issues and not much time left to 0.8alpha, so let's focus on bug fixing.

Engineering notation

2007-06-15T23:21:00.000+02:00

We developers have been talking about an engineering notation mode in SpeedCrunch for some time. I finally took the time and mood to implement it. Next version will make some people's life a bit easier, I guess. Like most scientific calculators, now we have the following behaviour when in engineering notation mode:

sqrt(sin(pi/3))
930.60485910209959894122e-3

Unlike scientific notation, already supported by the application for some time, the result will always be set so the exponent is a multiple of 3 and the number of integer digits are up to 3. Further support for engineering and inverse engineering functions and buttons will probably be added, so to make the following possible:

0.93060485910209959894122
930.60485910209959894122e-3
eng
930604.85910209959894122e-6
eng
930604859.10209959894122e-9

Maybe we can even add the option to show SI prefixes instead of exponents:

0.93060485910209959894122
930.60485910209959894122 mili
eng
930604.85910209959894122 micro
eng
930604859.10209959894122 nano

Now if I only had SpeedCrunch when I had to study electronics, physics and chemistry...

Review on FOSSwrite

2007-06-09T11:42:00.000+02:00

FOSSwire recently did a short review for SpeedCrunch:

...It is jam-packed full of features and advanced stuff which may come in handy if you’re cracking any big numbers on your desktop...

Read the complete review.

Combinatorics

2007-05-24T23:57:00.000+02:00

So now SpeedCrunch has got combinatorics support. Ariya had already implemented the famous ⁿC_r function, so I decided to code its cousin ⁿP_r.
I'd realized a nice optimization in Ariya's code. The general definition of ⁿC_r is given by

ⁿC_r = n! / ((n-r)! r!)
n, r ∈ N₀ , r ≤ n (applies all bellow)

But we can indeed reduce very much the number of integer multiplications with the derivation

r ∈ {0, n} ⇒ ⁿC_r = 1
r = 1 ⇒ ⁿC_r = n
r ∈ ]0, n/2] \ {1} ⇒ ⁿC_r = (r+1)_n / (n-r)!
r ∈ ]n/2, n[ \ {1} ⇒ ⁿC_r = (n-r+1)_n / r!

Note that (r+1)_n, for instance, is a modern factorial notation equivalent to (n)(n-1)...(r+1). I didn't know about this myself until now. This fasts computation a lot, else the very same calculations would be uselessly repeated.
In the very same way, I found a nice simplification for ⁿP_r. The general definition of ⁿP_r is given by

ⁿP_r = n! / (n-r)!

And again we can do some magic

r = 0 ⇒ ⁿP_r = 1
r = 1 ⇒ ⁿP_r = n
r = n ⇒ ⁿP_r = n!
r ∈ ]1, n[ ⇒ ⁿP_r = (n-r+1)_n

I spent some minutes getting to this conclusion and then I read it somewhere right after. First I felt a bit frustrated, then I smiled. It's funny to develop this program, it's funny to play maths.

I then realized my old Casio FX-880P can compute up to 69! and SpeedCrunch currently up to 96!, that's good enough (150-digit long integer). Nevertheless, when the user tries to calculate factorials, combinations or permutations with huge parameters the program freezes (even by the calc-as-you-type feature). Maybe it's really a good idea to define an upper limit for those functions input.

How to request a feature

2007-05-24T22:04:00.000+02:00

So, you really really like SpeedCrunch but in order to really "leave" the other calculator, you need a feature or two. For example, say you need to have hexadecimal and binary support. Then, perhaps you want to request a feature to be implemented in the next version. How to do this effectively?

First of all, make sure you use the latest version of SpeedCrunch. This is important because SpeedCrunch is constantly improved and often features requested by our users have made it into the release quite fast. You can get the version by choosing menu Help, About. You can compare it against what is shown in the download page (of the website).

Now go to issue list, click on New Issue. Enter a short summary (this is very important!) and type in the description of the feature that you'd like to have. Because this is going to be a feature, not a defect, you should change the label "Type:Defect". Just click on it and choose "Type:Enhancement" from the pop-up menu. Review again your description and if everything is fine, click the Submit button. Your feature request should appear on the issue list now.

It is equally important to search first for existing issues before requesting a feature. Perhaps it is already filed by someone, so you wouldn't want to duplicate. You can always add your own comment to someone's else feature request, perhaps to add your own opinion about it. To search for issue is very simple. From the issue list, enter keyword in the search box and click Search button. You may also want to change Open Issues to All Issues to be able to search resolved issues, in case your feature is already implemented. For example, don't ask for hex and binary support anymore because work on this has been started, as evidenced from issue #13.

And, we're waiting! Your wish is our command....

Take-off

2007-05-23T14:19:00.000+02:00

From now on, here you can follow what SpeedCrunch developers are working on or even just wondering about the direction it should take. Everybody can leave comments as well, this way providing useful feedback. Please help making this project become the best free multi-platform desktop calculator available by sharing your thoughts. Thank you and enjoy it.