Not Dead Yet

2013

Yep. I’m still working on GlassCalc 2. Here’s what’s new:

It won’t be called GlassCalc

I don’t know what it will be called yet, but glass is no longer prominent in the UI, so I don’t think it should be prominent in the name. Please tell me if you have ideas.

I know what it’s going to look like

Here’s a mockup of the new UI. (You’ll need to use Opera 15+ or Chrome to get anything other than a garbled mess.) In general, all of GlassCalc’s features are there, just in different places.

New UI stuff:

  • Clicking the deg/rad button in the upper-right toggles between degree and radian modes.
  • The “decimal” dropdown in the upper-right changes the default output format. You’ll be able to choose from decimal, scientific, fraction, hexadecimal, octal and binary.
  • The interface is now broken into tabs.
  • Menu gets you to all of the settings that you shouldn’t need to change often.
  • Calculate is the main view. It should be pretty obvious what this one is for. The new layout is inspired by Soulver, and anything that can be evaluated without changing variables will be done as you type.
  • Copy displays the calculator history as plain text, so you can easily copy any section of it.
  • Graph lets you graph functions. This one might not make it into the initial release.

Things that are the same, but different:

  • The input box at the bottom is gone. The calculator history itself will be editable.
  • The variables panel only shows user-defined variables and functions now. Built-in functions and constants will be found in a help window, which I haven’t designed yet.

How much is done?

  • The UI design
  • Most of the parser (I’m using Irony now)

How much isn’t done?

A lot. Don’t expect it to be done soon.

  • A few parser features, like unit conversion
  • The interpreter
  • The extensions system
  • An initial command line UI
  • The Windows UI

Currently, a Windows 8 UI isn’t possible because the Windows 8 API lacks a few features used in Irony. It might be possible to write replacements for those features, or modify Irony so it doesn’t depend on them though.

Also, since nothing in the parser/interpreter should be Windows-specific, it might be possible to get this running on Mono. I won’t be making UIs for Linux or Mac, but the command line version should run. I plan on making everything open source once it’s mostly functional, and I certainly won’t stop anyone from making UIs for other OSes.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.