A nice review

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

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

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?

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

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.